Abstract
Information about social partners is innately valuable to primates. Decisions about which sources of information to consume are highly naturalistic but also complex and place unusually strong demands on the brain's decision network. In particular, both the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) play key roles in decision making and social behaviour, suggesting a likely role in social information-seeking as well. To test this idea, we developed a ‘channel surfing' task in which monkeys were shown a series of 5 s video clips of conspecifics engaged in natural behaviours at a field site. Videos were annotated frame-by-frame using an ethogram of species-typical behaviours, an important source of social information. Between each clip, monkeys were presented with a choice between targets that determined which clip would be seen next. Monkeys' gaze during playback indicated differential engagement depending on what behaviours were presented. Neurons in both OFC and LPFC responded to choice targets and to video, and discriminated a subset of the behaviours in the ethogram during video viewing. These findings suggest that both OFC and LPFC are engaged in processing social information that is used to guide dynamic information-seeking decisions.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Existence and prevalence of economic behaviours among non-human primates’.
Highlights
Among primates, information about actual or potential social partners is valuable
The economic value of this social information is especially clear for the parasocial relationships [1] that many people form with public figures, with a large and profitable industry selling social information in the form of gossip magazines, celebrity biographies, reality television shows, and so on
Laboratory studies have revealed that social information carries economic value for monkeys, with animals foregoing the opportunity to consume desirable juice in order to consume information about social partners [3]
Summary
Information about actual or potential social partners is valuable. For humans, each of us carries complex models of our social partners’ personality, relationships and history in our minds, and most of us will expend considerable time and effort to exchange what we know about third parties with our immediate social partners; put more we gossip. The spatial and temporal limitations of functional magnetic resonance brain imaging (fMRI), the technique used by Sliwa and Friewald to uncover the SIN, leave unanswered whether individual neurons in OFC purely encode information about social interactions, their behavioural value, or both Together, these findings invite the possibility that more naturalistic task environments presenting ecologically relevant stimuli and eliciting species-typical behaviours may unmask the native coding scheme used by OFC, and that this area may be engaged to learn about the structure of the current social environment. These findings endorse the hypothesis that OFC and LPFC integrate information about relevant objects and events, as well as their value—a representation suitable for both learning the hidden structure of the environment and guiding decisions within it
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