Social Suppressive Behavior Is Organized by the Spatiotemporal Integration of Multiple Cortical Regions in the Japanese Macaque

Under social conflict, monkeys develop hierarchical positions through social interactions. Once the hierarchy is established, the dominant monkey dominates the space around itself and the submissive monkey tries not to violate this space. Previous studies have shown the contributions of the frontal and parietal cortices in social suppression, but the contributions of other cortical areas to suppressive functions remain elusive. We recorded neural activity in large cortical areas using electrocorticographic (ECoG) arrays while monkeys performed a social food-grab task in which a target monkey was paired with either a dominant or a submissive monkey. If the paired monkey was dominant, the target monkey avoided taking food in the shared conflict space, but not in other areas. By contrast, when the paired monkey was submissive, the target monkey took the food freely without hesitation. We applied decoding analysis to the ECoG data to see when and which cortical areas contribute to social behavioral suppression. Neural information discriminating the social condition was more evident when the conflict space was set in the area contralateral to the recording hemisphere. We found that the information increased as the social pressure increased during the task. Before food presentation, when the pressure was relatively low, the parietal and somatosensory–motor cortices showed sustained discrimination of the social condition. After food presentation, when the monkey faced greater pressure to make a decision as to whether it should take the food, the prefrontal and visual cortices started to develop buildup responses. The social representation was found in a sustained form in the parietal and somatosensory–motor regions, followed by additional buildup form in the visual and prefrontal cortices. The representation was less influenced by reward expectation. These findings suggest that social adaptation is achieved by a higher-order self-regulation process (incorporating motor preparation/execution processes) in accordance with the embodied social contexts.