Munuera Jérôme, Rigotti Mattia, Salzman C Daniel
Department of Neuroscience, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA.
Nat Neurosci. 2018 Mar;21(3):415-423. doi: 10.1038/s41593-018-0082-8. Epub 2018 Feb 19.
The social brain hypothesis posits that dedicated neural systems process social information. In support of this, neurophysiological data have shown that some brain regions are specialized for representing faces. It remains unknown, however, whether distinct anatomical substrates also represent more complex social variables, such as the hierarchical rank of individuals within a social group. Here we show that the primate amygdala encodes the hierarchical rank of individuals in the same neuronal ensembles that encode the rewards associated with nonsocial stimuli. By contrast, orbitofrontal and anterior cingulate cortices lack strong representations of hierarchical rank while still representing reward values. These results challenge the conventional view that dedicated neural systems process social information. Instead, information about hierarchical rank-which contributes to the assessment of the social value of individuals within a group-is linked in the amygdala to representations of rewards associated with nonsocial stimuli.
社会脑假说认为，专门的神经系统负责处理社会信息。支持这一观点的是，神经生理学数据表明，一些脑区专门用于表征面孔。然而，不同的解剖学基质是否也能表征更复杂的社会变量，比如社会群体中个体的等级地位，目前尚不清楚。在这里，我们表明，灵长类动物的杏仁核在与非社会刺激相关奖励的相同神经元集群中编码个体的等级地位。相比之下，眶额皮质和前扣带回皮质虽然仍能表征奖励价值，但缺乏对等级地位的强烈表征。这些结果挑战了传统观点，即专门的神经系统处理社会信息。相反，与群体中个体社会价值评估相关的等级地位信息，在杏仁核中与非社会刺激相关奖励的表征相联系。
