Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, University of Rome "La Sapienza", 00185 Rome, Italy.
Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod, UMR5229, 69675 Bron Cedex, France.
Cereb Cortex. 2022 Oct 8;32(20):4512-4523. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhab499.
Making decisions based on the actions of others is critical to daily interpersonal interactions. We investigated the representations of other's actions at single neural level in posterior medial prefrontal cortex (pmPFC) in two monkeys during the observation of actions of another agent, in a social interaction task. Each monkey separately interacted with a human partner. The monkey and the human alternated turns as actor and observer. The actor was required to reach one of two visual targets, avoiding the previously chosen target, while the observer monitored that action. pmPFC neurons decoupled in most cases self from others during both the execution and the observation of explicit actions. pmPFC neurons showed selective directional tuning specific for the agent who was executing the task. Moreover, we assessed the relationship of the response coding between the periods immediately before and after the action, by using a cross-modal decoding analysis. We found neural network stability from the action anticipation period to the observation of other's actions, suggesting a strong relationship between the anticipation and the execution of an action. When the monkey was the actor, the population coding appeared dynamic, possibly reflecting a goal-action transformation unique to the monkey's own action execution.
基于他人行为做出决策对于日常人际互动至关重要。我们在两只猴子的后内侧前额叶皮层（pmPFC）中进行了研究，观察了另一个代理的行为，以了解在社会互动任务中对他人行为的代表。每只猴子分别与人类伙伴互动。猴子和人类轮流作为演员和观察者。演员需要到达两个视觉目标中的一个，避免之前选择的目标，而观察者则监控该动作。在执行和观察明确的动作时，pmPFC 神经元在大多数情况下将自我与他人解耦。pmPFC 神经元表现出针对执行任务的代理的特定方向调谐。此外，我们通过使用跨模态解码分析来评估动作前后两个时期之间的响应编码关系。我们发现，从动作预期期到观察他人的动作，神经网络保持稳定，这表明动作的预期和执行之间存在很强的关系。当猴子是演员时，种群编码似乎具有动态性，可能反映了猴子自己执行动作所特有的目标-动作转换。
