Abstract
Monitoring our performance is fundamental to motor control while monitoring other’s performance is fundamental to social coordination. The striatum is hypothesized to play a role in action selection, action initiation, and action parsing, but we know little of its role in performance monitoring. Furthermore, the striatum contains neurons that respond to own and other’s actions. Therefore, we asked if striatal neurons signal own and conspecific’s performance errors. Two macaque monkeys sitting across a touch-sensitive table in plain view of each other took turns performing a simple motor task to obtain juice rewards while we recorded single striatal neurons from one monkey at a time. Both monkeys made more errors after individually making an error but made fewer errors after a conspecific error. Thus, monkeys’ behavior was influenced by their own and their conspecific’s past behavior. A population of striatal neurons responded to own and conspecific’s performance errors independently of a negative reward prediction error signal. Overall, these data suggest that monkeys are influenced by social errors and that striatal neurons signal performance errors. These signals might be important for social coordination, observational learning and adjusting to an ever-changing social landscape.
Highlights
Learning to scull a boat requires balance and motor coordination
We explored the influence of previous behavioral errors by the actor and its conspecific on the actor’s behavior by estimating conditional error rates, which we defined as the percentage of errors committed in the current trial parsed by what had occurred in the previous trial
We show that rhesus macaques were sensitive to both their conspecific’s errors and their own errors and that striatal neurons signalled performance errors
Summary
Learning to scull a boat requires balance and motor coordination. Learning this skill, or any other motor task, requires an online evaluation of performance. Primate anterior cingulate cortex contains such a signal[2,3,4,5,6] The activity of this area along with the basal ganglia is hypothesized to aid action selection and motor adaptation[7,8]. For example rowing in a boat with seven other people requires individual balance and motor coordination but necessitates motor coordination among the crew This activity requires monitoring own and other’s performance. It is vital to test behaviourally if the animals are sensitive to own and conspecific errors To test both hypotheses, we trained two monkeys, sitting face to face, to take turns completing a motor task in which we manipulated the payoff matrix to avoid confounding error-related activity with reward-related activity while recording the activity of striatal neurons in one monkey at a time (Fig. 1A)
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