SCSB Colloquium Series: Frequency Modules of Social Reward in the Brain

Date: Wednesday, February 7, 2024
Location: 46-3002 (Singleton Auditorium) + Zoom Webinar (https://mit.zoom.us/j/97035996656)

Speaker: Steve Chang, Ph.D.

Affiliation: Associate Professor of Psychology and of Neuroscience, Department of Psychology, Department of Neuroscience, Wu Tsai Institute, Kavli Institute for Neuroscience, Yale University

Host: Dr. Mehrdad Jazayeri

Talk title: Frequency Modules of Social Reward in the Brain

Abstract: Social interaction is essential to our daily lives, shaping interpersonal communication and the decisions we make. The first part of the presentation will describe our recent findings from studying the medial prefrontal-amygdala circuits when macaques make prosocial and antisocial decisions impacting the reward outcome of a partner. We found directionally selective ‘frequency modules’ that convey social decision variables (e.g., prosocial versus antisocial preference, vicarious versus experienced reward). These results support the importance of network-level modules in the social brain that are governed by frequency and direction selective information transfer. The second part of the presentation will describe a novel automated cooperation paradigm in freely moving marmosets that combines markerless behavioral tracking and a dynamic Bayesian network modeling of behavioral dependencies. Cooperation in this paradigm was guided by the strategic use of social information and was critically dependent on social relationships. Overall, this presentation emphasizes the importance of interareal interactions in the social brain and introduces a robust naturalistic cooperation paradigm suitable for neural investigation.