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Social Neuroscience

Our central methodological and conceptual contribution to establishing a new social neuroscience research direction within the German Primate Center and more broadly the Goettingen Campus is the development of a novel Dyadic Interaction Platform (DIP; together with Alex Gail and Stefan Treue). This platform served as a core asset in two major grants: Leibniz Collaborative Excellence grant “PRIMAINT: Neurophysiological mechanisms of primate interactions in dynamic sensorimotor setting”, and Collaborative Research Center (CRC) “Cognition of Interaction”. 

 

Dynamic interactions in transparent games

The development of the DIP was driven by the rationale that real-world decisions and interactions typically unfold continuously in real-time within a direct face-to-face sensorimotor context. To account for such context, we expanded the classical game-theoretical approach to more realistic conditions by introducing probabilistic action visibility, termed transparent games, and found that different levels of access to a partner’s choices change evolutionary successful strategies in simulated iterative dyadic interactions14. Building on this concept of transparent games, we implemented our platform using a transparent OLED display and two-sided touchscreens, enabling humans, monkeys or human-monkey pairs to interact face-to-face in a shared workspace, providing naturalistic but highly controlled social settings. This approach allowed us to combine game-theoretical approaches to value-based choices with real-time sensorimotor and perceptual decision-making, to study competition, cooperation, and dynamic integration of social and perceptual cues. Our first behavioral study using a transparent version of a classical coordination game “Bach-or-Stravinsky” showed that human and macaque pairs spontaneously converge to optimal but different coordination strategies (macaques opt for static simplicity while humans develop dynamic and “fair” turn-taking); and that in line with our theoretical predictions14, macaque dyads exhibit reaction time-dependent competitive dynamic turn-taking after learning to coordinate with a human confederate15

We are currently studying the neural underpinnings of dynamic dyadic coordination, using high-channel electrophysiological chronic array recordings (5 32-channel FMAs) in premotor cortex of monkeys working on a variant of the Bach-or-Stravinsky coordination task with an asynchronous action initiation, together with a predictable or unpredictable human confederate or a conspecific. 

The current version of the DIP platform includes dual binocular eye-tracking and DeepLabCut based motion capture pipeline combining multiple high-speed cameras. To prepare for a wide range of social interaction experiments, we conducted two methodological studies, on the development of a non-human primate (macaque) avatar16, and on the remote estimation of heart rate in macaques using video recordings17

Reward and Performance in Social Contexts

In the last decade our group was involved in several collaborative projects in the context of Leibniz ScienceCampus “Primate Cognition”, which has a focus on information integration in complex social environments (https://www.primate-cognition.eu). Together with Prof. Dr. Anne Schacht from the Psychology Department of Goettingen University we investigated how implicit reward associations influence human face visual processing, using EEG and pupillometry18. With Dr. Arezoo Pooresmaeili from the European Neuroscience Institute (now at University of Southampton, UK), we studied how received rewards are integrated during retrospective effort judgments in individual and dyadic settings19. We found that reward and performance-related information are combined in Bayes-optimal manner, but remarkably, the extent to which rewards influenced effort judgments was associated with conservative world-views, indicating links to general beliefs about the relationship between effort and earnings in society. The fact that more conservative attitudes correlated with greater influence of rewards on effort estimations shows that the behavior in a basic sensorimotor task might generalize to global attitudes with potential societal ramifications. This work stimulated a follow-up project on differential sensory and attributional biases in social effort perception20, as well as a computational modeling study on active inference underlying epistemic and reward value maximization in visual search paradigms21.

References

1.         Unakafov, A.M., Schultze, T., Gail, A., Moeller, S., Kagan, I., Eule, S., and Wolf, F. (2020). Emergence and suppression of cooperation by action visibility in transparent games. PLOS Computational Biology 16, e1007588. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007588.

2.         Moeller, S., Unakafov, A.M., Fischer, J., Gail, A., Treue, S., and Kagan, I. (2023). Human and macaque pairs employ different coordination strategies in a transparent decision game. eLife 12, e81641. doi.org/10.7554/eLife.81641.

3.         Wilson, V.A.D., Kade, C., Moeller, S., Treue, S., Kagan, I., and Fischer, J. (2020). Macaque Gaze Responses to the Primatar: A Virtual Macaque Head for Social Cognition Research. Front. Psychol. 11. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01645.

4.         Unakafov, A.M., Möller, S., Kagan, I., Gail, A., Treue, S., and Wolf, F. (2018). Using imaging photoplethysmography for heart rate estimation in non-human primates. PLOS ONE 13, e0202581. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202581.

5.         Hammerschmidt, W., Kagan, I., Kulke, L., and Schacht, A. (2018). Implicit reward associations impact face processing: Time-resolved evidence from event-related brain potentials and pupil dilations. NeuroImage 179, 557–569. doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.06.055.

6.         Rollwage, M., Pannach, F., Stinson, C., Toelch, U., Kagan, I., and Pooresmaeili, A. (2020). Judgments of effort exerted by others are influenced by received rewards. Sci Rep 10, 1–14. doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-58686-0.

7.         Stinson, C., Kagan, I., and Pooresmaeili, A. (2024). The contribution of sensory information asymmetry and bias of attribution to egocentric tendencies in effort comparison tasks. Front. Psychol. 15. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1304372.

8.         Heins, R.C., Mirza, M.B., Parr, T., Friston, K., Kagan, I., and Pooresmaeili, A. (2020). Deep Active Inference and Scene Construction. Front. Artif. Intell. 3. doi.org/10.3389/frai.2020.509354.