Division of Behavioral Development, Department of System Neuroscience, National Institute for Physiological Sciences, National Institutes of Natural Sciences, 38 Myodaiji, Okazaki, Aichi, 444-8585, Japan.
Department of Physiological Sciences, School of Life Science, The Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI), Hayama, Kanagawa, 240-0193, Japan.
Nat Commun. 2020 Oct 16;11(1):5233. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-19026-y.
Decision-making via monitoring others' actions is a cornerstone of interpersonal exchanges. Although the ventral premotor cortex (PMv) and the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) are cortical nodes in social brain networks, the two areas are rarely concurrently active in neuroimaging, inviting the hypothesis that they are functionally independent. Here we show in macaques that the ability of the MPFC to monitor others' actions depends on input from the PMv. We found that delta-band coherence between the two areas emerged during action execution and action observation. Information flow especially in the delta band increased from the PMv to the MPFC as the biological nature of observed actions increased. Furthermore, selective blockade of the PMv-to-MPFC pathway using a double viral vector infection technique impaired the processing of observed, but not executed, actions. These findings demonstrate that coordinated activity in the PMv-to-MPFC pathway has a causal role in social action monitoring.
通过监测他人的行为来做出决策是人际交流的基石。尽管腹侧前运动皮层（PMv）和内侧前额叶皮层（MPFC）是社交大脑网络中的皮质节点，但在神经影像学中很少同时激活这两个区域，这就引出了一个假设，即它们在功能上是独立的。在这里，我们在猕猴中表明，MPFC 监测他人行为的能力取决于来自 PMv 的输入。我们发现，在执行和观察动作期间，两个区域之间的 delta 波段相干性出现。随着观察到的动作的生物性质的增加，信息流，特别是在 delta 波段，从 PMv 增加到 MPFC。此外，使用双病毒载体感染技术选择性阻断 PMv 到 MPFC 的通路会损害对观察到的但未执行的动作的处理。这些发现表明，PMv 到 MPFC 通路中的协调活动在社会动作监测中具有因果作用。
