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Little is known about
how the brain processes visual information about the choices and actions of
others, and how this processed information is used to guide interactions with
others. We will use the newly developed Dyadic Interaction Platform to
investigate the neural circuits responsible for integrating sensory information
about visual stimuli and their behavioural relevance with information about what
others know (and do) about the same stimuli. These studies are an important
step towards understanding how social context modulates perceptual experience
and decision-making.
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Humans are highly social beings,
thus stimuli that are specifically important for successful social dynamic
interaction gain selected perception and beneficial processing. This has been
demonstrated particularly for stimuli that convey increased social, emotional,
and motivational relevance. The temporal course, possible hierarchies, and the
nature (i.e., parallel, additive, interactive) of the processing of different
relevance dimensions are yet largely unknown. This project aims at a functional
and temporal segregation of effects of the three different relevancies by
developing paradigms with orthogonal variations of relevance dimensions and
means of event-related brain potentials.
|  A building block of social cognition
is social monitoring, i.e., attending to conspecifics and their social
interactions, leading to better-informed decision-making for subsequent
interactions. This field project on wild macaques in Thailand will close gaps
in our understanding of selective attention by tracking head-gaze towards
different spontaneously unfolding interactions of other group members,
assessing hormonal correlates of inter-individual variation in attention, and
determining the resulting consequences for social network position, and
ultimately for individual fitness.
|  To understand the actions and
intentions of others, primates look at others’ faces. Facial motion allows the
visual system to anticipate inputs based on predictive information inherent in
movement sequences. We will determine whether face processing areas in the
macaque monkey’s temporal cortex utilise motion-derived predictions to optimise
neural coding of visual face information. To this end, we will manipulate the
predictiveness of head motion sequences while we perform fMRI-guided
electrophysiology and pharmacological inactivation. This will further our
understanding of the neural basis of “seeing each other” during dynamic
interactions in ecologically valid settings where agents are in motion.
|  This project investigates how
different levels of momentary predictability in the actions of one individual
influence the flow of information in the cortex of another, interacting
individual. Both, predictability of actions at the behavioural level as well as
the flow of information at the neural level will be quantified using rigorous
information theoretic measures that allow for a direct correlation between
them. The presence of a significant correlation indicates the presence of
predictive processing in the observing individual. The sign of the correlation
is indicative of specific processing strategies. We expect a conserved strategy
across species and experimental settings.
|  In any interaction of dyads the
recent as well as the distant past plays a role, shaping the next action and
the general strategy. We will investigate how and which aspects of the past
behaviour of the two agents predict their subsequent actions, and how to induce
strategy changes. To quantify and disentangle these past dependencies, we will
employ statistical models and information theory, and to induce strategy
changes in a controlled manner, we will develop a generalised dyadic foraging
game. Thereby, we can investigate precisely how cognitive processes in dyadic
interactions, in particular the temporal horizon over which information is
integrated, predict the chosen strategy of the agent.
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