scholarly journals Social-vocal brain networks in a non-human primate

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Y Takahashi ◽  
Ahmed El Hady ◽  
Yisi S Zhang ◽  
Diana A Liao ◽  
Gabriel Montaldo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Communication ◽  
Vocal Communication ◽  
Brain Network ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Distributed Network ◽  
Social Brain ◽  
Cortical Regions ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Human Primate

During social interactions, individuals influence each other to coordinate their actions. Vocal communication is an exceptionally efficient way to exert such influence. Where and how social interactions are dynamically modulated in the brain is unknown. We used functional ultrasound imaging in marmoset monkeys, a highly vocal species, to investigate the dynamics of medial social brain areas in vocal perception, production, and audio-vocal interaction. We found that the activity of a distributed network of subcortical and cortical regions distinguishes calls associated with different social contexts. This same brain network showed different dynamics during externally and internally driven vocalizations. These findings suggest the existence of a social-vocal brain network in medial cortical and subcortical areas that is fundamental in social communication.

scholarly journals Seven Computations of the Social Brain

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanaz Molapour ◽  
Cindy C Hagan ◽  
Brian Silston ◽  
Haiyan Wu ◽  
Maxwell Ramstead ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social World ◽  
Social Brain ◽  
Verbal Cues ◽  
True Nature ◽  
Multiple Modalities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Processing Demands ◽  
Social Signaling ◽  
The Brain

ABSTRACT The social environment presents the human brain with the most complex of information processing demands. The computations that the brain must perform occur in parallel, combine social and nonsocial cues, produce verbal and non-verbal signals, and involve multiple cognitive systems; including memory, attention, emotion, learning. This occurs dynamically and at timescales ranging from milliseconds to years. Here, we propose that during social interactions, seven core operations interact to underwrite coherent social functioning; these operations accumulate evidence efficiently – from multiple modalities – when inferring what to do next. We deconstruct the social brain and outline the key components entailed for successful human social interaction. These include (1) social perception; (2) social inferences, such as mentalizing; (3) social learning; (4) social signaling through verbal and non-verbal cues; (5) social drives (e.g., how to increase one’s status); (6) determining the social identity of agents, including oneself; and (7) minimizing uncertainty within the current social context by integrating sensory signals and inferences. We argue that while it is important to examine these distinct aspects of social inference, to understand the true nature of the human social brain, we must also explain how the brain integrates information from the social world.

Adaptive Prediction for Social Contexts: The Cerebellar Contribution to Typical and Atypical Social Behaviors

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 475-493
Author(s):  
Catherine J. Stoodley ◽  
Peter T. Tsai
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Communication ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Predictive Processing ◽  
Social Deficits ◽  
Cerebellar Dysfunction ◽  
Appropriate Behavior ◽  
Communication Challenges ◽  
And Function

Social interactions involve processes ranging from face recognition to understanding others’ intentions. To guide appropriate behavior in a given context, social interactions rely on accurately predicting the outcomes of one's actions and the thoughts of others. Because social interactions are inherently dynamic, these predictions must be continuously adapted. The neural correlates of social processing have largely focused on emotion, mentalizing, and reward networks, without integration of systems involved in prediction. The cerebellum forms predictive models to calibrate movements and adapt them to changing situations, and cerebellar predictive modeling is thought to extend to nonmotor behaviors. Primary cerebellar dysfunction can produce social deficits, and atypical cerebellar structure and function are reported in autism, which is characterized by social communication challenges and atypical predictive processing. We examine the evidence that cerebellar-mediated predictions and adaptation play important roles in social processes and argue that disruptions in these processes contribute to autism.

scholarly journals AUTS2 regulation of synapses for proper synaptic inputs and social communication

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kei Hori ◽  
Kunihiko Yamashiro ◽  
Taku Nagai ◽  
Wei Shan ◽  
Saki F. Egusa ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Psychiatric Disorders ◽  
Social Communication ◽  
Neuronal Migration ◽  
Vocal Communication ◽  
Excitatory Synapses ◽  
Synaptic Inputs ◽  
Electrophysiological Recordings ◽  
Fos Expression ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Primary Cultured Neurons

AbstractImpairments in synapse development are thought to cause numerous psychiatric disorders. Autism susceptibility candidate 2 (AUTS2) gene has been associated with various psychiatric disorders, such as autism and intellectual disabilities. Although roles for AUTS2 in neuronal migration and neuritogenesis have been reported, its involvement in synapse regulation remains unclear. In this study, we found that excitatory synapses were specifically increased in the Auts2-deficient primary cultured neurons as well as Auts2 mutant forebrains. Electrophysiological recordings and immunostaining showed increases in excitatory synaptic inputs as well as c-fos expression in Auts2 mutant brains, suggesting that an altered balance of excitatory and inhibitory inputs enhances brain excitability. Auts2 mutant mice exhibited autistic-like behaviors including impairments in social interaction and altered vocal communication. Together, these findings suggest that AUTS2 regulates excitatory synapse number to coordinate E/I balance in the brain, whose impairment may underlie the pathology of psychiatric disorders in individuals with AUTS2 mutations.

scholarly journals Early alterations of social brain networks in young children with autism

eLife ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Franz Sperdin ◽  
Ana Coito ◽  
Nada Kojovic ◽  
Tonia Anahi Rihs ◽  
Reem Kais Jan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Functional Connectivity ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Brain Networks ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Brain Network ◽  
Social Brain ◽  
Compensatory Mechanisms ◽  
Source Imaging ◽  
Gaze Patterns ◽  
Cortical Regions

Social impairments are a hallmark of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), but empirical evidence for early brain network alterations in response to social stimuli is scant in ASD. We recorded the gaze patterns and brain activity of toddlers with ASD and their typically developing peers while they explored dynamic social scenes. Directed functional connectivity analyses based on electrical source imaging revealed frequency specific network atypicalities in the theta and alpha frequency bands, manifesting as alterations in both the driving and the connections from key nodes of the social brain associated with autism. Analyses of brain-behavioural relationships within the ASD group suggested that compensatory mechanisms from dorsomedial frontal, inferior temporal and insular cortical regions were associated with less atypical gaze patterns and lower clinical impairment. Our results provide strong evidence that directed functional connectivity alterations of social brain networks is a core component of atypical brain development at early stages of ASD.

scholarly journals Dwelling quietly in the rich club: brain network determinants of slow cortical fluctuations

2015 ◽  
Vol 370 (1668) ◽  
pp. 20140165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonardo L. Gollo ◽  
Andrew Zalesky ◽  
R. Matthew Hutchison ◽  
Martijn van den Heuvel ◽  
Michael Breakspear
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Scales ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Brain Network ◽  
Morphological Properties ◽  
Brain Organization ◽  
Rich Club ◽  
Guiding Principle ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Cortical Regions ◽  
The Brain

For more than a century, cerebral cartography has been driven by investigations of structural and morphological properties of the brain across spatial scales and the temporal/functional phenomena that emerge from these underlying features. The next era of brain mapping will be driven by studies that consider both of these components of brain organization simultaneously—elucidating their interactions and dependencies. Using this guiding principle, we explored the origin of slowly fluctuating patterns of synchronization within the topological core of brain regions known as the rich club, implicated in the regulation of mood and introspection. We find that a constellation of densely interconnected regions that constitute the rich club (including the anterior insula, amygdala and precuneus) play a central role in promoting a stable, dynamical core of spontaneous activity in the primate cortex. The slow timescales are well matched to the regulation of internal visceral states, corresponding to the somatic correlates of mood and anxiety. In contrast, the topology of the surrounding ‘feeder’ cortical regions shows unstable, rapidly fluctuating dynamics likely to be crucial for fast perceptual processes. We discuss these findings in relation to psychiatric disorders and the future of connectomics.

scholarly journals Pragmatic Language Processing in the Adolescent Brain

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Salomi S. Asaridou ◽  
Ö. Ece Demir-Lira ◽  
Julia Uddén ◽  
Susan Goldin-Meadow ◽  
Steven L. Small
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Cognitive Processing ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Language Comprehension ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Pragmatic Competence ◽  
Pragmatic Language ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Preceding Question

Adolescence is a developmental period in which social interactions become increasingly important. Successful social interactions rely heavily on pragmatic competence, the appropriate use of language in different social contexts, a skill that is still developing in adolescence. In the present study, we used fMRI to characterize the brain networks underlying pragmatic language processing in typically developing adolescents. We used an indirect speech paradigm whereby participants were presented with question/answer dialogues in which the meaning of the answer had to be inferred from the context, in this case the preceding question. Participants were presented with three types of answers: (1) direct replies, i.e., simple answers to open-ended questions, (2) indirect informative replies, i.e., answers in which the speaker’s intention was to add more information to a yes/no question, and (3) indirect affective replies, i.e., answers in which the speaker’s intention was to express polite refusals, negative opinions or to save face in response to an emotionally charged question. We found that indirect affective replies elicited the strongest response in brain areas associated with language comprehension (superior temporal gyri), theory of mind (medial prefrontal cortex, temporo-parietal junction, and precuneus), and attention/working memory (inferior frontal gyri). The increased activation to indirect affective as opposed to indirect informative and direct replies potentially reflects the high salience of opinions and perspectives of others in adolescence. Our results add to previous findings on socio-cognitive processing in adolescents and extend them to pragmatic language comprehension.

scholarly journals Adolescent tuning of association cortex in human structural brain networks

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
František Váša ◽  
Jakob Seidlitz ◽  
Rafael Romero-Garcia ◽  
Kirstie J. Whitaker ◽  
Gideon Rosenthal ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Sharp Decrease ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Brain Network ◽  
Association Cortex ◽  
Structural Correlation ◽  
Age Related ◽  
Cortical Regions ◽  
Structural Networks ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Age Related Changes

AbstractMotivated by prior data on local cortical shrinkage and intracortical myelination, we predicted age-related changes in topological organisation of cortical structural networks during adolescence. We estimated structural correlation from magnetic resonance imaging measures of cortical thickness at 308 regions in a sample of N=297 healthy participants, aged 14-24 years. We used a novel sliding-window analysis to measure age-related changes in network attributes globally, locally and in the context of several community partitions of the network. We found that the strength of structural correlation generally decreased as a function of age. Association cortical regions demonstrated a sharp decrease in nodal degree (hubness) from 14 years, reaching a minimum at approximately 19 years, and then levelling off or even slightly increasing until 24 years. Greater and more prolonged age-related changes in degree of cortical regions within the brain network were associated with faster rates of adolescent cortical myelination and shrinkage. The brain regions that demonstrated the greatest age-related changes were concentrated within prefrontal modules. We conclude that human adolescence is associated with biologically plausible changes in structural imaging markers of brain network organization, consistent with the concept of tuning or consolidating anatomical connectivity between frontal cortex and the rest of the connectome.

scholarly journals Valence of social information is encoded in different subpopulations of mushroom body Kenyon cells in the honeybee brain

2019 ◽  
Vol 286 (1910) ◽  
pp. 20190901 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian M. Traniello ◽  
Zhenqing Chen ◽  
Vikram A. Bagchi ◽  
Gene E. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Fundamental Property ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Early Gene ◽  
Evolutionary Divergence ◽  
Neural Activation ◽  
Positive And Negative Valence ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Honeybee Brain

Over 600 Myr of evolutionary divergence between vertebrates and invertebrates is associated with considerable neuroanatomical variation both across and within these lineages. By contrast, valence encoding is an important behavioural trait that is evolutionarily conserved across vertebrates and invertebrates, and enables individuals to distinguish between positive (potentially beneficial) and negative (potentially harmful) situations. We tested the hypothesis that social interactions of positive and negative valence are modularly encoded in the honeybee brain (i.e. encoded in different cellular subpopulations) as in vertebrate brains. In vertebrates, neural activation patterns are distributed across distinct parts of the brain, suggesting that discrete circuits encode positive or negative stimuli. Evidence for this hypothesis would suggest a deep homology of neural organization between insects and vertebrates for valence encoding, despite vastly different brain sizes. Alternatively, overlapping localization of valenced social information in the brain would imply a ‘re-use' of circuitry in response to positive and negative social contexts, potentially to overcome the energetic constraints of a tiny brain. We used immediate early gene expression to map positively and negatively valenced social interactions in the brain of the western honeybee Apis mellifera . We found that the valence of a social signal is represented by distinct anatomical subregions of the mushroom bodies, an invertebrate sensory neuropil associated with social behaviour, multimodal sensory integration, learning and memory. Our results suggest that the modularization of valenced social information in the brain is a fundamental property of neuroanatomical organization.

scholarly journals Long-lasting vocal plasticity in adult marmoset monkeys

2019 ◽  
Vol 286 (1905) ◽  
pp. 20190817 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lingyun Zhao ◽  
Bahar Boroumand Rad ◽  
Xiaoqin Wang
Keyword(s):  
Social Communication ◽  
New World ◽  
Vocal Communication ◽  
Vocal Learning ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Primate Species ◽  
Vocal Production ◽  
Vocal Plasticity ◽  
Common Marmosets ◽  
World Primate

Humans exhibit a high level of vocal plasticity in speech production, which allows us to acquire both native and foreign languages and dialects, and adapt to local accents in social communication. In comparison, non-human primates exhibit limited vocal plasticity, especially in adulthood, which would limit their ability to adapt to different social and environmental contexts in vocal communication. Here, we quantitatively examined the ability of adult common marmosets ( Callithrix jacchus ), a highly vocal New World primate species, to modulate their vocal production in social contexts. While recent studies have demonstrated vocal learning in developing marmosets, we know much less about the extent of vocal learning and plasticity in adult marmosets. We found, in the present study, that marmosets were able to adaptively modify the spectrotemporal structure of their vocalizations when they encountered interfering sounds. Our experiments showed that marmosets shifted the spectrum of their vocalizations away from the spectrum of the interfering sounds in order to avoid the overlap. More interestingly, we found that marmosets made predictive and long-lasting spectral shifts in their vocalizations after they had experienced a particular type of interfering sound. These observations provided evidence for directional control of the vocalization spectrum and long-term vocal plasticity by adult marmosets. The findings reported here have important implications for the ability of this New World primate species in voluntarily and adaptively controlling their vocal production in social communication.

scholarly journals Brain Network Modeling Based on Mutual Information and Graph Theory for Predicting the Connection Mechanism in the Development of Alzheimer's Disease

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Si Shuaizong ◽  
Wang Bin ◽  
Liu Xiao ◽  
Yu Chong ◽  
Ding Chao ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mutual Information ◽  
Brain Networks ◽  
Brain Network ◽  
Network Efficiency ◽  
Characteristic Path Length ◽  
Connection Probability ◽  
Network Topologies ◽  
Cortical Regions ◽  
Anatomical Space ◽  
The Brain

Abnormal connections in brain networks of healthy people always bring the problems of cognitive impairments and degeneration of specific brain circuits, which may finally result in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Exploring the development of the brain from normal controls (NC) to AD is an essential part of human research. Although connections changes have been found in the development, the connection mechanism that drives these changes remain incompletely understood. The purpose of this study is to explore the connection changes in brain networks in the process from NC to AD, and uncover the underlying connection mechanism that shapes the topologies of AD brain networks. In particular, we propose a model named MINM from the perspective of topology-based mutual information to achieve our aim. MINM concerns the question of estimating the connection probability between two cortical regions with the consideration of both the mutual information of their observed network topologies and their Euclidean distance in anatomical space. In addition, MINM considers establishing and deleting connections, simultaneously, during the networks modeling from the stage of NC to AD. Experiment results show that MINM is sufficient to capture an impressive range of topological properties of real brain networks such as characteristic path length, network efficiency, and transitivity, and it also provides an excellent fit to the real brain networks in degree distribution compared to experiential models. Thus, we anticipate that MINM may explain the connection mechanism for the formation of the brain network organization in AD patients.

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