Division of Life Sciences and Medicine, University of Science and Technology of China, Heifei, China; State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Science and Mental Health, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
Jiepin Huang
State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Science and Mental Health, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Science and Mental Health, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center, Hefei, China; Institute of Advanced Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China
Michael L Platt
Department of Psychology, School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States; Marketing Department, the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States; Department of Neuroscience, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States
State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Science and Mental Health, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
Social relationships guide individual behavior and ultimately shape the fabric of society. Primates exhibit particularly complex, differentiated, and multidimensional social relationships, which form interwoven social networks, reflecting both individual social tendencies and specific dyadic interactions. How the patterns of behavior that underlie these social relationships emerge from moment-to-moment patterns of social information processing remains unclear. Here, we assess social relationships among a group of four monkeys, focusing on aggression, grooming, and proximity. We show that individual differences in social attention vary with individual differences in patterns of general social tendencies and patterns of individual engagement with specific partners. Oxytocin administration altered social attention and its relationship to both social tendencies and dyadic relationships, particularly grooming and aggression. Our findings link the dynamics of visual information sampling to the dynamics of primate social networks.