Oxytocin and social gaze during a dominance categorization task in tufted capuchin monkeys

Visual attention to facial features is an important way that group-living primate species gain knowledge about others. However, where this attention is focused on the face is influenced by contextual and social features, and emerging evidence in Pan species suggests that oxytocin, a hormone involved in forming and maintaining affiliative bonds among members of the same group, influences social attention as measured by eye gaze. Specifically, bonobos tend to focus on conspecifics’ eyes when viewing two-dimensional images, whereas chimpanzees focus more on the edges of the face. Moreover, exogenous oxytocin, which was hypothesized to increase eye contact in both species, instead enhanced this existing difference. We follow up on this to (1) determine the degree to which this Pan pattern generalizes across highly social, cooperative non-ape primates and (2) explore the impact of exogenously administered vs. endogenously released oxytocin in impacting this behavior. To do so, we tracked gaze direction on a computerized social categorization task using conspecific faces in tufted capuchin monkeys (Sapajus [Cebus] apella) after (1) exogenously administering intranasal oxytocin using a nebulizer or (2) inducing an endogenous increase in oxytocin using fur-rubbing, previously validated to increase oxytocin in capuchins. Overall, we did not find a general tendency in the capuchins to look toward the eyes or mouth, but we found that oxytocin was related to looking behavior toward these regions, albeit not in a straightforward way. Considering frequency of looking per trial, monkeys were more likely to look at the eye region in the fur-rubbing condition as compared to either the saline or exogenous oxytocin conditions. However, in terms of duration of looking during trials in which they did look at the eye region, monkeys spent significantly less time looking at the eyes in both oxytocin conditions as compared to the saline condition. These results suggest that oxytocin did not necessarily enhance eye looking in capuchins, which is consistent with the results from Pan species, and that endogenous and exogenous oxytocin may behave differently in their effect on how social attention is allocated.