[Abstract Title]. - Society for Neuroscience

Conclusions: These preliminary results suggest that humans and chimpanzees employ a similar
distributed neural system for face recognition. A second study will use these results as functional
ROIs to further investigate chimpanzee face-selective regions, including a possible chimpanzee
fusiform face area. This study represents an important development in the use of functional
neuroimaging of our closest living relative towards the identification of human neural
specializations for social cognition.
Disclosures: E.E. Hecht , None; S.K. Barks, None; T.M. Preuss, None; J.K. Rilling,
None; J.R. Votaw, None; L.A. Parr, None.
Poster
297. Social Recognition and Partner Preference
Time: Sunday, November 16, 2008, 1:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Program#/Poster#: 297.15/TT33
Topic: F.03.c. Social behavior
Support: CREST, JST
JSPS Research Fellowships for Young Scientists
Title: Simultaneous presentation of the facial and vocal emotion induces bimodal responses in
the amygdala neurons
Authors: *K. KURAOKA 1,2,3 , K. NAKAMURA 1,2 ;
1 Dept Animal Models Human Dis, Natl. Inst. Neurosci, Kodaira, Japan; 2 CREST, JST,
Kawaguchi, Japan; 3 JSPS, Chiyoda, Japan
Abstract: The face and voice can independently convey the same information about people‟s
emotional states. Therefore, when we see an angry face or hear an angry voice, we can perceive
the person‟s anger. These two different sensory cues are interchangeable in this sense. The
amygdala has been implicated in the processing of emotional expressions. In our previous study
(Kuraoka & Nakamura, 2007), we recorded the activity of single neurons in the amygdala of the
rhesus monkey while presenting video clips of species-specific emotional expressions and found
that about one fifth of neurons, which responded to at least one of the monkey emotional
expressions, maintained a good response when either the facial emotion or vocal emotion was
presented alone. However, it remained unclear how those bimodal responses were generated.
One possibility is that those bimodal responses were the result of simultaneous presentation of
facial emotion and vocal emotion because the subject monkey had simultaneously seen facial
emotion and heard vocal emotion many times during the experiment. Thus, in the present study,