XClose

UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology

Home
Menu

Brain Meeting: Steve Chang

17 May 2024, 3:15 pm–4:15 pm

WCHN logo

Prosocial Interaction and the Social Brain

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All

Cost

Free

Organiser

Brain Meetings

Location

Seminar Room
12 Queen Square
Queen Square
London
WC1N 3AR
United Kingdom

Please contact ion.fil.brainmeetings@ucl.ac.uk for a Zoom link.

Social interaction is essential to our daily lives, shaping interpersonal communication and the decisions we make. The first part of the presentation will describe our recent findings from studying the medial prefrontal-amygdala circuits when rhesus macaques make prosocial and antisocial decisions impacting the reward outcome of a partner. We found directionally selective ‘frequency modules’ that convey social decision and reward variables (e.g., prosocial versus antisocial preference, vicarious versus experienced reward). These results support the importance of network-level modules in the social brain that are governed by frequency and direction selective information routing. The second part of the presentation will describe a novel automated cooperation paradigm in freely moving common marmosets that combines markerless behavioral tracking, a dynamic Bayesian network modeling of behavioral dependencies, and wireless neuronal recording. Cooperation in this paradigm was guided by the strategic use of social gaze and was critically dependent on social relationships. Overall, this presentation emphasizes the importance of interareal interactions in the social brain and introduces a robust naturalistic cooperation paradigm suitable for neural investigation.

About the Speaker

Steve Chang

Associate Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience at Wu Tsai Institute, Kavli Institute for Neuroscience, Yale University

More about Steve Chang