The majority of the research exploring the neurobiology of reward and decision making has utilized primary reinforcers, such as food and water. However, in naturalistic contexts, a myriad of other factors influence motivation and decision. For social animals, such as humans and many monkeys, monitoring conspecifics provides essential information about threats, mating opportunities, potential food sources, and other facets essential to survival and reproduction. Thus social information is natural effector of orienting decisions. In conjunction with electrophysiology, a recently developed pay-per-view visual orienting task in which monkeys choose to look at targets yielding either a juice reward or a juice reward and the opportunity to view an image of a familiar conspecific provides a novel tool for understanding the representation of social reward. Furthermore, neural data generated by this task will elucidate the mechanisms by which reward information is combined across modalities and used to create and execute a single, coherent plan of action. This research will elucidate how the brain integrates the disparate and potentially conflicting motivations to acquire social information and nutritive rewards in order to select the most beneficial action. This knowledge will have important implications for neuropsychiatric disorders such as gambling and addiction in which decision making is abnormal. Additionally, understanding the neurobiology of social motivation and decision making could lead to improved treatments for disorders in which social behavior is disrupted, including autism and social anxiety disorder.
| Klein, Jeffrey T; Platt, Michael L (2013) Social information signaling by neurons in primate striatum. Curr Biol 23:691-6 |
| Chang, Steve W C; Brent, Lauren J N; Adams, Geoffrey K et al. (2013) Neuroethology of primate social behavior. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 110 Suppl 2:10387-94 |
| Klein, Jeffrey T; Shepherd, Stephen V; Platt, Michael L (2009) Social attention and the brain. Curr Biol 19:R958-62 |
| Klein, Jeffrey T; Deaner, Robert O; Platt, Michael L (2008) Neural correlates of social target value in macaque parietal cortex. Curr Biol 18:419-24 |
