Social Processing and Neural Plasticity

社会加工和神经可塑性

• 批准号: 9568273
• 负责人: David A Leopold
• 金额: $ 44.91万
• 依托单位: NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF MENTAL HEALTH
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 至
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9568273
• 关键词: Adult; Animals; Area; Behavior; Brain; Callithrix; Categories; Cells; Cerebral cortex; Cognition; Collaborations; Complement; Complex; Comprehension; Development; Electrodes; Electrophysiology (science); Evolution; Exhibits; Eye Movements; Face; Functional Imaging; Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Glean; Human; Individual; Infant; Investigation; Laboratories; Learning; Life; Link; Macaca; Manuals; Manuscripts; Maps; Mediating; Methods; Microelectrodes; Modeling; Monitor; Monkeys; Motion; Movement; Nervous system structure; Neuronal Plasticity; Neurons; Ocular Fixation; Patients; Perception; Preparation; Primates; Process; Published Comment; Publishing; Research; Role; Shapes; Signal Transduction; Social Behavior; Specific qualifier value; Stimulus; Testing; Time; United States National Institutes of Health; Ursidae Family; Vision; Visual; Visual Accommodation; Work; base; convict; developmental plasticity; experimental study; follow-up; imaging modality; interest; movie; neuromechanism; neuropsychiatric disorder; nonhuman primate; optical imaging; programs; relating to nervous system; response; social; social learning; social neuroscience; theories

Neuroscientists studying the brain use stimuli with different levels of complexity to study the neural mechanism of sight. These stimuli range from dots and lines, to faces and bodies. Decades of investigation using electrophysiological and functional imaging methods have revealed that the brains of humans and animals are replete with neurons that respond selectively to particular visual features. These favored features are of many types, with brain areas organized in an apparent cascade of simpler features identified early in the pipeline, and more complex ones identified later. Selectively responding neurons are often said to represent individual visual features. The normal interplay between primates does not much resemble the contrived and controlled experiments that have given rise to our theories about brain function. A logical question, then, is whether a neuron that represents a feature, say a face, in one context will also represent that face in a different context. Humans are a particularly large primate species, but are typical of primates in some ways, such as the abundant use of vision to mediate interaction with others. The primate brain has a significant fraction of its billions of neurons dedicated to the processing of social stimuli. An exciting challenge for neuroscientists is to understand how the neural representation of stimuli gleaned from conventional testing paradigms bears on perception and behavior under more natural conditions. Over the past year, we have used extensively a microwire bundle array developed and modified in the laboratory to longitudinally track the activity of cells in the brain that reside in so-called face patches, which are small, circumscribed regions showing greater fMRI responses to faces than to other categories of stimuli. We recently investigated fMRI responses in the face patches of both macaques (Russ et al.,2015) and marmosets (Hung et al., 2015). Within the last year, we have continued this line of research in both species, with new results published in the macaque. In one free-viewing study in the macaque, we tracked the relative contribution of motion caused by the subjects own eye movements to the fMRI signals in the brain (Russ et al., 2016). In this study, we showed that the brain areas responding to the motion in a movie video were very different than those responsive to an animals own eye movements. In another study (Park et al., 2017) which is a follow up to a previous electrophysiology study (McMahon et al., 2015), we developed a new method for understanding the surprising functional diversity of neurons within <1mm3 area in the cerebral cortex. That study tracked the time course of both neuron activity and fMRI activity in monkeys watching 5-minute movies. By comparing the time courses of voxels throughout the brain to each neurons response, we obtained whole-brain activity maps for each neuron. This method then allowed us to classify neurons based on their affiliation with other areas throughout the brain. Multiple other studies are underway in the laboratory, in both macaques and marmosets. In the macaques, for example, we are presently preparing a manuscript that describes the way in which neurons in face patches respond to the facial identity of monkey and human faces (Koyano et al., in preparation). This study is in many ways a follow up to a study published more than a decade ago (Leopold et al., 2006), and is closely related to recent work published by Doris Tsao and colleagues. This work highlights the important role of the average face, which serves as a learned norm to steer the brains perception of individual identity. In the marmoset, we are setting up to investigate the developmental plasticity of face identity learning, using a combination of microelectrode and optical imaging methods. A common theme in these projects is an ethological and evolutionary perspective as they shape theories of brain function. To that end, in the last year we have published three reviews and commentaries on the topic of social neuroscience and evolution. One of these, published in Jon Kaass 4-volume set Evolution of Nervous Systems, focuses on the evolution of high-level visual specialization in primates (Leopold et al., 2017). Another is a discussion of the use of marmosets as a model to study issues in social neuroscience (Miller et al., Neuron, 2016). The last of these is a highlight of a recent study in human patients, where naturalistic viewing was combined with intracranial ECoG recordings (Leopold and Russ, 2017).

神经科学家研究大脑使用刺激具有不同水平的复杂性，以研究视力的神经机制。 这些刺激范围从点和线到面部和身体。 使用电生理学和功能成像方法进行数十年的研究表明，人类和动物的大脑充满了神经元，对特定的视觉特征有选择性地反应。 这些偏爱的特征是多种类型的，大脑区域以一系列明显的简单特征在管道中发现的明显级联组成，稍后鉴定出更复杂的特征。 选择性反应的神经元通常被认为代表单个视觉特征。灵长类动物之间的正常相互作用并不类似于引起我们关于大脑功能的理论的人为和受控的实验。因此，一个合乎逻辑的问题是，在某种情况下，代表特征（例如面部）的神经元是否也会在不同的情况下代表该面孔。人类是一种特别大的灵长类动物，但在某些方面是典型的灵长类动物，例如大量使用视力来介导与他人的相互作用。 灵长类动物的大脑在数十亿个神经元中的很大一部分致力于处理社会刺激。神经科学家的一个令人兴奋的挑战是了解如何在更自然的条件下从传统测试范式中收集的刺激的神经表示。 在过去的一年中，我们已经在实验室开发和修改了一个微型束阵列，以纵向跟踪大脑中细胞的活性，该细胞的活性驻留在所谓的面部斑块中，这些面部斑块是小的，限制的区域，表现出对面部面孔的较大fMRI响应，而不是其他类别的刺激。 我们最近研究了猕猴（Russ等人，2015年）和Marmosets（Hung等，2015）的面部斑块中的fMRI响应。 在过去的一年中，我们继续在这两个物种中进行了这一研究，并在猕猴中发表了新的结果。 在猕猴的一项自由观看研究中，我们跟踪了受试者自己的眼动对大脑fMRI信号引起的运动的相对贡献（Russ等，2016）。 在这项研究中，我们表明，电影视频中对动作的大脑区域与对动物自己的眼动动物的反应大不相同。 在另一项研究（Park等，2017）中，这是先前的电生理研究（McMahon等，2015）的后续研究，我们开发了一种新方法，以了解大脑皮质中<1mm3区域内神经元的惊人功能多样性。 该研究追踪了猴子观看5分钟电影的神经元活动和fMRI活动的时间过程。 通过将整个大脑的体素的时间疗程与每个神经元反应进行比较，我们获得了每个神经元的全脑活性图。 然后，这种方法使我们可以根据神经元与整个大脑其他区域的隶属关系进行分类。 在实验室中，猕猴和桃花心蛋白的其他多项研究正在进行中。 例如，在猕猴中，我们目前正在准备一种手稿，该手稿描述了脸部斑块中神经元对猴子和人脸的面部身份做出反应的方式（Koyano等人，准备中）。 这项研究在许多方面是十多年前发表的一项研究的后续研究（Leopold等，2006），与Doris Tsao及其同事最近出版的工作密切相关。 这项工作突出了普通面的重要作用，这是一种学习的规范，可以引导大脑对个人身份的看法。 在Marmoset中，我们正在设置使用微电极和光学成像方法的组合，研究面部身份学习的发展可塑性。 这些项目中的一个共同主题是塑造大脑功能理论的伦理学和进化观点。 为此，在去年，我们发表了三篇关于社会神经科学和进化论的评论和评论。 其中之一，发表在Jon Kaass 4卷中神经系统的演变中，重点是灵长类动物中高级视觉专业化的演变（Leopold等，2017）。 另一个是讨论使用摩尔果作为研究社会神经科学问题的模型的讨论（Miller等，Neuron，2016）。 其中的最后一个是最近在人类患者中进行的一项研究的亮点，该研究将自然主义观看与颅内生态记录相结合（Leopold和Russ，2017年）。