Project Summary Our proposal will investigate how neuronal coordination between the medial frontal cortex (MFC) and the basolateral amygdala (BLA) is causally involved in complex social interactions. We will capitalize on our newly developed social gaze interaction paradigm in pairs of rhesus macaques to understand the neurobiological mechanisms of MFC-BLA coupling, with a goal of working toward generating a macaque model of social dysfunction. We will first determine whether and how the two regions are coordinated during various social gaze events (e.g., looking at the eyes or mutual eye contact). We will then stimulate MFC, BLA or both in order to disrupt the MFC-BLA coordination to induce social gaze deficits. Finally, we will examine whether these disruptions are generalizable to other social domains by testing the impact of perturbing MFC-BLA coordination in a complex social decision-making game. Informed by these results, we hope to investigate in the future how pharmacological (systemic or focal drug manipulations) and behavioral (social interaction manipulations) interventions could effectively restore the inducible social deficits.

Public Health Relevance Statement / Project Narrative Social dysfunctions found in numerous psychiatric disorders, such as autism, psychopathy, social anxiety, and major depressive disorders, are associated with impairments in integrating social information across the frontal cortices and the amygdala. We will investigate the neural mechanisms that guide these interactions and their causal contributions during real-life social gaze interactions by recording neuronal activity and disrupting the neuronal coordination. We will then test the generalizability of these disruptions in a complex social decision- making domain.