Join this interactive session as Keshov Sharma and Lizabeth Romanski discuss their paper, “Neuronal Population Encoding of Identity in Primate Prefrontal Cortex”, with JNeurosci Editor-in-Chief Sabine Kastner. Attendees can submit questions at registration and live during the webinar.
Below is the significance statement of the paper published on November 14, 2023 in JNeurosci and authored by Keshov Sharma, Mark Diltz, Theodore Lincoln, Eric Albuquerque, and Lizabeth Romanski.
Primates are unique in their ability to process and utilize complex, multisensory social information. The brain networks that support this are distributed across the temporal and frontal lobes. In this study, we characterize how social variables like identity and expression are encoded in the neural activity of the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), a prefrontal region of the macaque brain. We found that most single neurons do not appear to encode these variables, but populations of neurons display similar activity patterns that are primarily differentiated by the identity of the conspecific that a macaque is attending to. Furthermore, by employing dynamic, audiovisual, multisensory stimuli, our experiment better approximates real world conditions, making our findings more generalizable.
