There is a fundamental gap in understanding the neural bases of social cognition. Atypical behaviors associatedwith mental disorders like autism spectrum disorders or major depressive disorder often present with deficitsin social interaction. Understanding these deficits and developing targeted therapies will continue to proveimpossible until the neural bases of typical social cognition are understood. To reveal these neural bases, it isthe central thesis of this proposal to focus on those components of social cognition that allow precise externalstimulus manipulation to elucidate social information processing. Faces form just such a category of uniquelysocial stimuli that bridge vision and social cognition. More so, faces are processed by a highly organized systemof cortical areas that are tightly interconnected into a face-processing network. Still, past work on face patcheshas been critically limited to the properties of single face cells. In order to overcome these limitations, thecommon marmoset was recently discovered to have superficially located face patches, which, when paired withfunctional two-photon calcium imaging, enables simultaneous recordings from large populations of face cells.The long-term goal is to establish a mechanistic understanding of social cognition. The objective is to elucidatehow a class of socially relevant stimuli is encoded by neural population in a cell-type dependent manner. Thecentral hypothesis is that a face patch contains a map that exclusively represents faces in a spatially organizedand cell-type specific manner. The rationale of this proposal is that it will establish the neural representation offaces, a basic component of social cognition, from the level of single cells to cortical maps in a new modelsystem amenable to modern gene-editing approaches and thus disease model development. The hypothesis willbe tested by pursing three specific aims: 1) to determine the functional specificity of a face patch; 2) to identifythe principles of spatial organization within a face patch; and 3) to elucidate cell-type specific contributions toface processing. Under the first and second aim, two-photon microscopy will be used to measure neural activityfrom a large population of neurons. This will allow the determination of the spatial organization of facerepresentations. Under the third aim, this technique will be combined with tissue clearing and volumetricimmunohistochemistry to contribute morphological and cell type specific information about the population ofneurons. The approach of this proposal is innovative because it combines several cutting-edge techniques witha novel model system to establish the functional architecture of a key social brain circuit. This research issignificant because it generates a mechanistic understanding of face processing, illuminates a critical linkbetween the visual system and the social brain, and forms a new model system in which further hypothesesunderlying mechanisms of mental disorders can be rigorously tested to gain mechanistic understanding of asystem tangibly contributing to our understanding of typical and atypical human behavior.
Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC)
Autism Research Database (AFD)
