Neural Circuit Mechanisms Mediating TMS and Oxytocin Effects on Social Cognition

We are requesting an increase in the yearly direct costs to support the aims of the MERIT renewal. What we propose is a dramatic leap into the future of social neuroscience and lies at the bleeding edge of current technology. The proposed research is innovative, ambitious, and necessary for understanding how primate, and by extension human, brains enable appropriate social behavior in the real world. Our proposal advances understanding of how primate brains generate appropriate social behavior through a tightly-integrated, ambitious set of 4 specific aims combining simultaneous wireless neurophysiological recordings in multiple freely-moving monkeys interacting naturally in varied social contexts, semi-to-fully-automated quantification of social behavior using computer vision, pharmacological manipulations, and reversible perturbations of neural activity. To our knowledge, none of these experiments has ever been attempted in macaques. Our pilot data compellingly demonstrate that we can do it.