Neural mechanisms of social preferences

动物和人类不仅能够接受感官信息，而且还能够将这些感官刺激赋予某种价值。神经科学中的一个关键问题是，大脑如何对这些关于刺激的显著性或重要性的信息进行编码。影响行为偏好的参数被深入研究的一个领域是配偶选择。在许多物种中，雌性根据特定的特征表现出对雄性的偏好。然而，这些偏好和配偶选择决策背后的神经机制在很大程度上尚未被探索。

Both animals and humans are capable not only of taking in sensory information but also attributing some value to those sensory stimuli, and a critical question in neuroscience is how the brain encodes such information about the salience or significance of a stimulus. One area where the parameters affecting behavioural preferences have been intensively well studied is mate choice. In many species, females show preferences for males based on particular features. However, the neural mechanisms underlying these preferences and mate choice decisions are largely unexplored.