| dc.description.abstract |
<p>The ability to monitor, learn from, and respond to social information is essential
for many highly social animals, including humans. Deficits to this capacity are associated
with numerous psychopathologies, including autism spectrum disorders, social anxiety
disorder, and schizophrenia. To understand the neural mechanisms supporting social
information seeking behavior requires understanding this behavior in its natural context,
and presenting animals with species-appropriate stimuli that will elicit the behavior
in the laboratory. In this dissertation, I describe a novel behavioral paradigm I
developed for investigating social information seeking behavior in rhesus macaques
in a laboratory setting, with the use of naturalistic videos of freely-behaving conspecifics
as stimuli. I recorded neural activity in the orbitofrontal and lateral prefrontal
cortex of monkeys as they engaged in this task, and found evidence for a rich but
sparse representation of natural behaviors in both areas, particularly in the orbitofrontal
cortex. This sparse encoding of conspecifics' behaviors represents the raw material
for social information foraging decisions.</p>
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