Speakers > Stefan Everling

Stefan Everling

University of Western Ontario, London, Canada

Functional networks for social cognition in the common marmoset

The New World common marmoset is rapidly becoming an important additional nonhuman primate model next to the standard Old World rhesus macaque monkey. Although macaque monkeys are widely used to study the neural basis of higher cognitive function, they may not be an ideal nonhuman primate model for studying the neural basis of social cognition, as laboratory studies of social behavior are challenging due to their size and aggression toward conspecifics. In contrast to macaques, marmosets live in family groups and share important social similarities with humans, such as prosocial behavior, imitation, and cooperative breeding. Their small size combined with recent wireless and datalogger recording techniques make it also possible to record high density neural activity during natural social behaviour in this species. Thus the common marmoset holds tremendous promise as a nonhuman primate model for investigating the neural basis of social cognition. In this talk, I will present several studies in which we have started to map neural circuits involved in social cognition in awake marmosets using ultra-high-field fMRI at 9.4T. These include networks for face processing, social action observation, object-directed action observation, predator observation, and for processing conspecific calls. I will also present a method for simultaneously measuring the whole-brain activation of two socially interacting marmoset monkeys using fMRI.