Cortical Contributions to a Combined Appetitive-Aversive Social Outcome Task.

Learning through the emotional states of others is a critical skill for navigating our complex social environments, which is why it is a focal point of investigation in social neuroscience. Significant advances have been made in recent years, highlighting cortical brain regions where the transfer and processing of socially-derived affective information may be taking place. Among these regions are the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), known for their roles in attention and valuation during decision-making tasks, respectively. However, social decision-making studies have typically focused on either reward or punishment as the outcome valence, making it difficult to determine the social specificity of neural contributions observed. Using a social task that manipulates reward and shock within the same experiment, I recorded single-unit activity from ACC and OFC in rats. I found that during the task, ACC activity shared responses for reward and shock outcomes, suggesting it encoded socially-derived information in the service of attention. OFC neurons showed responses to self and vicarious reward outcomes, consistent with previous work in primates. Interestingly, OFC also encoded the positive value of the rats’ approach to their conspecific following foot-shock delivery, which leads to stress relief and a reduced fear response. Thus, in this task, ACC and OFC encoded other-related outcome information with respect to the self, in accordance with their nonsocial functions, suggesting that during social decision-making tasks, internal state goals are prioritized when outcomes to the self are at stake