We are very proud for our ESR8-Amir Esmaeili-, who successfully defended his thesis on March 3rd entitled: “Neural bases of others’ presence: A multi-scale probabilistic framework of social facilitation“.
Congratulations to Dr. Amir and all the best for your next step in academia!
Jury:
Jerome SALLET (Rapporteur)
Daniele MARINAZZO (Rapporteur)
Athena AKRAMI (Examinatrice)
Andrea BROVELLI (Examinateur)
Julie GREZES (Présidente du jury)
Driss BOUSSAOUD (Directeur de thèse)
Viktor Jirsa (Membre invité)
Meysam HASHEMI (Membre invité)
Abstract: Perception of conspecifics is an invariant and integral prerequisite of social cognition in myriad social species. While the neurobiological underpinnings of such stimuli remain largely enigmatic, on a behavioral scale, mere presence of others reportedly modulates task performance based on task complexity. We attempt to bridge this gap by investigating how others’ presence perturbs synaptic efficacy across three spatiotemporal brain scales, and how such perturbations could conduce to improvements of task performance in Rhesus monkeys and human participants. In monkeys performing an association learning task, social presence elevated the excitatory synaptic efficacy of attention-oriented regions dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex. In humans performing a lateral interception task, conspecific presence facilitated performance in the females subject group, and this facilitation was linked to enhancements of synaptic efficacy within the Dorsal and Ventral Attention Networks. We posit that presence-induced enhancements to performance stem from attentional modulation mediated by changes in excitatory synaptic efficacy across spatiotemporal brain scales, namely microscale (single neurons), mesoscale (cortical micro-columns) and macroscale (whole-brain). Our insights from probabilistic inference coalesce to propose a fresh, multi-scale framework on the neural bases of others’ presence, paving the path for future forays into the intricate interplay between mere presence, behavior, and neural dynamics.
