Burke, S. N., Thome, A., Plange, K., Engle, J. R., Trouard, T. P., Gothard, K. M., & Barnes, C. A. (2014). Orbitofrontal cortex volume in area 11/13 predicts reward devaluation, but not reversal learning performance, in young and aged monkeys. Journal of Neuroscience, 34(30), 9905-9916.
BIO5 Collaborators
Carol A Barnes, Katalin M Gothard
Gothard, K. M. (2017). Bridging the gap between rodents and humans: The role of non-human primates in oxytocin research. American Journal of Primatology.
Minxha, J., Mosher, C., Morrow, J. K., Mamelak, A. N., Adolphs, R., Gothard, K. M., & Rutishauser, U. (2017). Fixations Gate Species-Specific Responses to Free Viewing of Faces in the Human and Macaque Amygdala. Cell reports, 18(4), 878-891.
Neurons in the primate amygdala respond prominently to faces. This implicates the amygdala in the processing of socially significant stimuli, yet its contribution to social perception remains poorly understood. We evaluated the representation of faces in the primate amygdala during naturalistic conditions by recording from both human and macaque amygdala neurons during free viewing of identical arrays of images with concurrent eye tracking. Neurons responded to faces only when they were fixated, suggesting that neuronal activity was gated by visual attention. Further experiments in humans utilizing covert attention confirmed this hypothesis. In both species, the majority of face-selective neurons preferred faces of conspecifics, a bias also seen behaviorally in first fixation preferences. Response latencies, relative to fixation onset, were shortest for conspecific-selective neurons and were ∼100 ms shorter in monkeys compared to humans. This argues that attention to faces gates amygdala responses, which in turn prioritize species-typical information for further processing.
Gothard, K. M. (2017). New perspectives on the neurophysiology of primate amygdala emerging from the study of naturalistic social behaviors. Wiley Interdisciplinary Review in Cognitive Sciene, 9(1). doi:10.1002/wcs
Gothard, K. M. (2017). Silicon foreign body in the cerebrum of a rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta)”. Comparative Medicine.