A Network for Social Interaction Understanding in the Primate Brain

Vancouver Convention Centre 

Primates continuously decode complex visual scenes into material entities, such as agents, their movements, and their interactions (Grahe and Bernieri, 1999, Ambady et al., 2000). Social interactions and their meaning are quickly recognized by monkeys: they understand grooming, play, and fight, infer social rank from interactions, and utilize this knowledge to recruit allies (Cheney et al., 1986, Bergman et al., 2003). While this understanding is a core cognitive component in primates (Grahe and Bernieri, 1999, Spelke and Kinzler, 2007) and is particularly vulnerable to social pathologies (Kennedy and Adolphs, 2012), little is known about the neural circuitry that underlies it.