Functional Networks for Social Communication in the Macaque Monkey

Abstract

All primates communicate. To dissect the neural circuits of social communication, we used fMRI to map non-human primate brain regions for social perception, second-person (interactive) social cognition, and orofacial movement generation. Face perception, second-person cognition, and face motor networks were largely non-overlapping and acted as distinct functional units rather than an integrated feedforward-processing pipeline. Whereas second-person context selectively engaged a region of medial prefrontal cortex, production of orofacial movements recruited distributed subcortical and cortical areas in medial and lateral frontal and insular cortex. These areas exhibited some specialization, but not dissociation, of function along the medio-lateral axis. Production of lipsmack movements recruited areas including putative homologs of Broca's area. These findings provide a new view ofthe neural architecture for social communicationand suggest expressive orofacial movements generated by lateral premotor cortex as a putative evolutionary precursor to human speech.