Student Symposium 2025: The Social Brain

The Social Brain: recognition, communication, and learning in dynamic social environments

Speakers:  Erica van de Waal, Jo Cutler, Daniela Vallentin, Charley Wu, Michael Sheehan

Social interactions shape our thoughts, actions, and emotions. At the core of these interactions lies the ability to recognise individuals, communicate effectively, and navigate the delicate balance between cooperation and competition in dynamic social environments. How does the brain support these complex cognitive functions across species? This symposium will explore the neural, behavioural, and computational foundations of social learning and interaction across species. We will examine how individuals recognize and respond to social partners, how prosocial behaviours emerge, and how social information is interpreted to guide decision-making. By integrating insights from neuroscience, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology, we aim to uncover the fundamental principles that guide how individuals learn from and influence one another.

Provisional Schedule* 

*all timings in BST (UTC+1)

ABSTRACTS

Erica van de waal – Exploring cultural inheritance in wild vervet monkeys
My research investigates how individuals learn from others and make decisions in complex, changing environments, using a mix of innovative experimental, observational, and physiological approaches. Two main fundamental questions have guided my research so far. First, I have aimed to better understand social learning biases in the wild, i.e., when, what and from whom do individuals learn. One of my most significant contributions in this area is to have revealed that individuals typically focus their attention on philopatric models, who are females in vervet monkeys. This directed social learning can lead to complex cultural dynamics at the population level, whereby different groups differentiate culturally over food preferences, not explained by local resource availability. Nevertheless, I also showed that immigrant males play a role in diffusing new knowledge among groups. Specifically, I revealed that even though immigrants readily changed their diet to conform to the preferences of their group, they can also trigger novel food acquisition of their group members when other food sources are scarce. Recently, I have been describing three major phases in the ontogeny of cultural transmission: a vertical transmission phase with infants learning from their mother, an oblique one with juveniles learning from other group members, and a horizontal one with immigrants learning from residents, and I am developing research to understand its role in shaping behavioural pattern at the group and population levels. The second research topic of intergroup group behavioural variation is a topic that has been neglected until recently, with more research focusing on individual or population-level variation. With my large longitudinal field site, I am uniquely placed to address this question, as evidenced by my publications on topics ranging from dietary preferences to sociality, intergroup encounters and intersexual dominance. Combining the results from multiple experiments and observations will much broaden our knowledge of the role of social learning for behavioural phenotypes in primates, which should help us to better understand what makes our human culture so unique.

Daniela Vallentin – Neural mechanisms of vocal learning and production in songbirds
Learning and executing complex motor skills relies heavily on sensory feedback and contextual cues.  In vocal behaviors, auditory input plays a crucial role throughout learning and mature production.  We investigate the influence of auditory feedback on vocal development and flexibility in songbirds. We examined the impact of female vocal feedback on song learning in zebra finches. Juvenile males raised with females exhibited more accurate imitation of tutor song features compared to socially isolated birds. Females also provided practice-specific feedback, increasing vocalizations as the young birds' song improved. Intracellular recordings in HVC, a key premotor area, revealed that female vocalizations modulate neural activity in juveniles during both listening and singing. These findings demonstrate the importance of female vocal feedback in song development and highlight how non-tutor vocal input shapes the neural circuitry of song acquisition. Furthermore, we explored the mechanisms stabilizing adult song, finding that inhibition within HVC closes the critical period by suppressing tutor influence. Reopening this period in adult zebra finches using a cell-type specific viral strategy allowed the birds to learn novel song elements, suggesting potential applications for enhancing motor skill learning and recovery.

Beyond developmental learning, we investigate real-time vocal flexibility in wild nightingales. We demonstrated that these birds can instantaneously match the pitch of conspecific whistles and pitch-controlled playbacks across their vocal range. This precise, year-round pitch matching suggests a stable neural substrate. The higher precision of prompt pitch matches indicates a direct auditory-motor mapping for online vocal replication.  Further investigation revealed that nightingales also adjust syllable durations to match playback stimuli. However, when presented with novel pitch and duration combinations, they prioritize either spectral or temporal  matching, constrained by their natural vocal repertoire. This reveals a novel dimension of vocal flexibility and potential trade-offs in real-time vocal adjustments during interactive communication, making nightingales a promising model for studying sensorimotor transformation.

SWC/GCNU Student Symposium Team

The Student Symposium is organised jointly by PhD students of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour and the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit of University College London. This is the seventh instalment of an annual discussion-based event that aims to bring together neuroscience researchers from the UK and abroad to engage with current and future problems in neuroscience.