Social interactions rely on the interpretation of semantic and emotional information, often from multiple sensory modalities. Nonhuman primates send and receive auditory and visual communicative signals. However, the neural mechanisms underlying the association of visual and auditory information based on their common social meaning are unknown. Using heart rate estimates and functional neuroimaging, we show that in the lateral and superior temporal sulcus of the macaque monkey, neural responses are enhanced in response to species-specific vocalisations paired with a matching visual context, or when vocalisations follow, in time, visual information, but inhibited when vocalisation are incongruent with the visual context. For example, responses to affiliative vocalisations are enhanced when paired with affiliative contexts but inhibited when paired with aggressive or escape contexts. Overall, we propose that the identified neural network represents social meaning irrespective of sensory modality.

社交互动依赖于对语义和情感信息的解释，通常来自多种感官模式。非人类灵长类动物发送和接收听觉和视觉交流信号。然而，基于视觉和听觉信息的共同社会意义关联的神经机制尚不清楚。使用心率估计和功能性神经影像学，我们表明在猕猴的外侧和颞上沟中，神经反应在响应与匹配的视觉环境配对的特定物种发声时得到增强，或者当发声及时地跟随视觉时，神经反应得到增强。信息，但在发声与视觉环境不一致时被抑制。例如，当与附属语境配对时，对附属语发声的反应会得到增强，但在与攻击性或逃避语境配对时会受到抑制。总体而言，我们建议识别的神经网络代表社会意义，而与感官模式无关。