Ricerc@Sapienza

Every day we interact with the world around us in many ways, monitoring each other's actions to cooperate and learn from others. Various abilities are necessary for complex social behavior, and many of these are shared between humans and monkeys; among these abilities, monkeys indeed represent a valid model among animals to study social interaction due to the complexity of their social life and hierarchical social structures. For this reason, we want to investigate whether the Frontal Pole (FP, Broadmann Area 10), a prefrontal area involved in the monitoring of self-generated actions (Tsujimoto et al. 2010), play a role also in the monitoring of other's actions. To achieve that, we want to analyze neurophysiological data collected in the past two years from two rhesus monkeys while they performed a task interacting with a social agent.
Two monkeys were implanted with chronic arrays to record the extracellular activity of single neurons in the FP. After the implant, the monkeys performed a social variant of a Non-match-to-go task (NMTG) designed to investigate social interaction. In the classical version of the NMTG task, four different geometrical figures are presented in pairs in each trial. One of the two object was the one presented in the previous trial, while the other one was chosen between the other possible three. The rule required to select the object of the couple that was not selected in the previous trial. In the social variant the monkeys had to perform the task interacting with a human agent, alternating between the roles of actor and observer. This version of the NMTG allows the confrontation between execution and observation condition between two social agents that alternates during an interactive task. Furthermore, the monkeys performed an additional control condition during which they cooperate with an inanimate agent (a cursor moving on the screen) that mimics the action of the human agent.