Behavioral context affects social signal representations within single primate prefrontal cortex neurons

We tested whether social signal processing in more traditional,
head-restrained contexts is representative of the putative natural analog
– social communication – by comparing responses to vocalizations within
individual neurons in marmoset prefrontal cortex (PFC) across a series of
behavioral contexts ranging from traditional to naturalistic. Although
vocalization responsive neurons were evident in all contexts,
cross-context consistency was notably limited. A response to these social
signals when subjects were head-restrained was not predictive of a
comparable neural response to the identical vocalizations during natural
communication. This pattern was evident both within individual neurons and
at a population level, as PFC activity could be reliably decoded for the
behavioral context in which vocalizations were heard. These results
suggests that neural representations of social signals in primate PFC are
not static, but highly flexible and likely reflect how nuances of the
dynamic behavioral contexts affect the perception of these signals and
what they communicate.