Pendergraft LomaJohn T, Marzluff John M, Cross Donna J, Shimizu Toru, Templeton Christopher N
School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, United States.
Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, United States.
Front Physiol. 2021 Nov 18;12:766345. doi: 10.3389/fphys.2021.766345. eCollection 2021.
Social interaction among animals can occur under many contexts, such as during foraging. Our knowledge of the regions within an avian brain associated with social interaction is limited to the regions activated by a single context or sensory modality. We used 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) to examine American crow () brain activity in response to conditions associated with communal feeding. Using a paired approach, we exposed crows to either a visual stimulus (the sight of food), an audio stimulus (the sound of conspecifics vocalizing while foraging) or both audio/visual stimuli presented simultaneously and compared to their brain activity in response to a control stimulus (an empty stage). We found two regions, the nucleus taenia of the amygdala (TnA) and a medial portion of the caudal nidopallium, that showed increased activity in response to the multimodal combination of stimuli but not in response to either stimulus when presented unimodally. We also found significantly increased activity in the lateral septum and medially within the nidopallium in response to both the audio-only and the combined audio/visual stimuli. We did not find any differences in activation in response to the visual stimulus by itself. We discuss how these regions may be involved in the processing of multimodal stimuli in the context of social interaction.
动物之间的社会互动可以在多种情境下发生，比如觅食期间。我们对鸟类大脑中与社会互动相关区域的了解仅限于由单一情境或感官模式激活的区域。我们使用18F-氟脱氧葡萄糖正电子发射断层扫描（FDG-PET）来检测美洲鸦（）在与群体进食相关条件下的大脑活动。采用配对方法，我们让乌鸦分别接受视觉刺激（看到食物）、听觉刺激（觅食时同种个体发声的声音）或同时呈现的视听两种刺激，并将其与乌鸦对对照刺激（空舞台）的大脑活动进行比较。我们发现两个区域，即杏仁核的带状核（TnA）和尾侧巢皮质的内侧部分，对多模式刺激组合有反应时活动增加，但单模式呈现任一刺激时则无反应。我们还发现，仅听觉刺激以及视听联合刺激均会使外侧隔区和巢皮质内侧的活动显著增加。我们未发现仅视觉刺激本身会引起激活差异。我们讨论了这些区域在社会互动情境下可能如何参与多模式刺激的处理。
