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Decision making

Reliable social switch

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 25, page 3 (2024)Cite this article

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The neural basis of whether an observer relies on prior experience or shifts to rely on the behaviour of others when making a choice is unknown. Mahmoodi et al. have assessed how the reliability of social information influences such shifts in decision making and identified the underlying frontopolar–temporal neural circuit in non-human primates.

The authors trained macaques to perform a series of behavioural experiments while inside a functional MRI (fMRI) scanner and recorded whole-brain activity. First, the authors sought to identify brain areas encoding another macaque’s face direction (gaze direction is an important cue in non-human primate social situations). To achieve this, a neutral (gazing forward) or directed (gazing left or right) macaque face appeared, followed by a blank screen, after which a directed face appeared. The macaques then had to choose the second face’s gaze direction to obtain reward. The directed faces could be the same or different, enabling the authors to use repetition suppression — where a repeated stimulus feature reduces neural activity — to determine that the mid-portion of the superior temporal sulcus fundus (mSTS) encoded another macaque’s face direction.

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  1. Nature Reviews Neuroscience http://www.nature.com/nrn/

    Jake Rogers

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  1. Jake Rogers
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Correspondence to Jake Rogers.

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Rogers, J. Reliable social switch. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 25, 3 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-023-00771-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-023-00771-0

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