Department of Pharmacology, Institute of Neuroscience and Physiology, The Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden.
Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
Transl Psychiatry. 2020 Sep 19;10(1):318. doi: 10.1038/s41398-020-00991-3.
The mechanisms underlying the role of oxytocin (OT) as a regulator of social behavior in mammals are only partly understood. Recently, it has been proposed that OT increases the salience of social stimuli. We carried out a randomized, double-blind, cross-over study of the effects of OT on binocular rivalry, a visual phenomenon underpinned by the interplay of excitation and inhibition in the cortex. A final sample of 45 participants viewed images of social stimuli (faces with different emotional expressions) and non-social stimuli (houses and Gabor patches). We demonstrate a robust effect that intranasal OT increases the salience of human faces in binocular rivalry, such that dominance durations of faces are longer-this effect is not modulated by the facial expression. We tentatively show that OT treatment increases dominance durations for non-social stimuli. Our results lend support to the social salience hypothesis of OT, and in addition offer provisional support for the role of OT in influencing excitation-inhibition balance in the brain.
催产素（OT）作为哺乳动物社会行为调节因子的作用机制尚不完全清楚。最近有人提出，OT 会增加社会刺激的显著性。我们进行了一项随机、双盲、交叉的 OT 对双眼竞争影响的研究，双眼竞争是一种视觉现象，其基础是大脑皮层兴奋和抑制的相互作用。最终有 45 名参与者观看了社会刺激（具有不同情绪表达的面孔）和非社会刺激（房屋和 Gabor 补丁）的图像。我们证明了一个强大的效应，即鼻内 OT 增加了双眼竞争中人脸的显著性，使得人脸的优势持续时间更长——这种效应不受面部表情的调节。我们初步表明，OT 处理增加了非社会刺激的优势持续时间。我们的结果支持 OT 的社会显著性假设，此外还为 OT 在影响大脑中兴奋-抑制平衡方面的作用提供了初步支持。
