Platt Michael L, Seyfarth Robert M, Cheney Dorothy L
Departments of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Marketing, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2016 Feb 5;371(1687):20150096. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2015.0096.
Studies of the factors affecting reproductive success in group-living monkeys have traditionally focused on competitive traits, like the acquisition of high dominance rank. Recent research, however, indicates that the ability to form cooperative social bonds has an equally strong effect on fitness. Two implications follow. First, strong social bonds make individuals' fitness interdependent and the 'free-rider' problem disappears. Second, individuals must make adaptive choices that balance competition and cooperation-often with the same partners. The proximate mechanisms underlying these behaviours are only just beginning to be understood. Recent results from cognitive and systems neuroscience provide us some evidence that many social and non-social decisions are mediated ultimately by abstract, domain-general neural mechanisms. However, other populations of neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex, striatum, amygdala and parietal cortex specifically encode the type, importance and value of social information. Whether these specialized populations of neurons arise by selection or through developmental plasticity in response to the challenges of social life remains unknown. Many brain areas are homologous and show similar patterns of activity in human and non-human primates. In both groups, cortical activity is modulated by hormones like oxytocin and by the action of certain genes that may affect individual differences in behaviour. Taken together, results suggest that differences in cooperation between the two groups are a matter of degree rather than constituting a fundamental, qualitative distinction.
对群居猴子繁殖成功率影响因素的研究传统上聚焦于竞争特质，比如获得高支配地位。然而，近期研究表明，形成合作性社会纽带的能力对适应性具有同样强大的影响。由此产生两个影响。其一，强大的社会纽带使个体的适应性相互依存，“搭便车”问题消失。其二，个体必须做出适应性选择，以平衡竞争与合作——通常是与相同的伙伴。这些行为背后的近端机制才刚刚开始被理解。认知神经科学和系统神经科学的最新研究成果为我们提供了一些证据，表明许多社会和非社会决策最终是由抽象的、领域通用的神经机制介导的。然而，眶额皮质、纹状体、杏仁核和顶叶皮质中的其他神经元群体专门编码社会信息的类型、重要性和价值。这些专门的神经元群体是通过选择产生的，还是通过发育可塑性以应对社会生活的挑战而产生的，目前尚不清楚。许多脑区是同源的，在人类和非人类灵长类动物中表现出相似的活动模式。在这两个群体中，皮质活动都受到催产素等激素以及某些可能影响行为个体差异的基因作用的调节。综合来看，研究结果表明，两组之间合作的差异只是程度问题，而非构成根本的、质的区别。
