Overview
Michael Platt, Ph.D.
For humans and nonhuman primates alike, deeper and more numerous social connections promote health, well-being, and survival. Precisely how primates navigate the multidimensional social relationships that structure daily life and shape survival and reproductive success remains a mystery.
In this webinar, Dr. Platt will discuss how his research combines ethological analyses with new wireless recording technologies and computer vision to uncover neural signatures of natural behavior in unrestrained, socially interacting rhesus macaques.
Neuronal activity in the prefrontal and temporal cortex robustly encoded 24 species-typical behaviors and also signaled the presence and identity of neighboring monkeys. Male-female partners demonstrated near-perfect reciprocity in grooming, a key behavioral mechanism supporting friendships and alliances, and neural activity maintained a running account of these social investments.
When confronted with an aggressive intruder, behavioral and neural population responses reflected empathy and were buffered by the presence of a partner. Surprisingly, neural signatures in the prefrontal and temporal cortex were largely indistinguishable and irreducible to visual and motor contingencies. Dr. Platt’s work reveals a highly distributed neurophysiological ledger of social dynamics, offering a potential computational foundation supporting communal life in primate societies, including our own.
Biography
Dr. Michael Platt is the Director of the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative and the James S. Riepe Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor of Marketing, Neuroscience, and Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Leader’s Brain and over 300 articles.
Dr. Platt is the former Director of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke, and the founding Co-Director of the Duke Center for Neuroeconomic Studies. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Guardian, and National Geographic, as well as on ABC’s Good Morning America, NPR, CBC, BBC, MTV, and HBO’s Vice.
He currently serves on the advisory boards of multiple companies and the Yang-Tan Autism Centers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. He previously served on the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Brain Science, was President of the Society for Neuroeconomics, consulted on the film The Fountain by Darren Aronofsky, and co-founded the brain health and performance company Cogwear.
Closed captioning will be available for the webinar. People who need reasonable accommodations to participate in this event should contact Allison Hurst at [email protected]. Requests should be made at least 5 days in advance.
