WASHINGTON, DC -- Humans, primates, and many other animals are innately social, spending much of their lifetimes in the presence of other individuals, but little is known about the neural mechanisms that generate social behaviors. Recent advances offer insight into neural circuits and mechanisms that underlie social decision-making, cooperation, and aggression. The studies are being presented at Neuroscience 2017, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and the world's largest source of emerging news about brain science and health.
The neurobiology of social behaviors can be challenging to study partly due to the difficulty of recording brain activity in behaving animals. Advances in the design and durability of devices for recording brain activity have now enabled the targeted study of discrete brain structures during social behaviors, revealing the activation of a wide array of neural circuits during social interactions with other individuals.
Today's new findings show that:
"In the past, studies focused on brain lesions or pharmacological manipulations that affected an animal with respect to its social interaction toward others," said press conference moderator Robert Greene, a professor in the departments of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. "We now see evidence of shared and interactive neuronal activity between social partners that extends to such things as cooperative behavior and learning and decision-making."
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This research was supported by national funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, as well as other public, private, and philanthropic organizations worldwide. Find out more about the neuroscience of social behavior on BrainFacts.org .
The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) is an organization of nearly 37,000 basic scientists and clinicians who study the brain and nervous system.