Probabilistic inference of social presence across brain scales reveals enhanced synaptic efficacy

The presence of conspecifics is a fundamental and arguably invariant prerequisite of social cognition across numerous animal species. While the influence of social presence on behavior has been among the focal points of investigation in social psychology for over a century, its underlying neural mechanisms remain largely unexplored. Here, we attempt to bridge this gap by investigating how the presence of conspecifics changes synaptic efficacy from measurements across spatiotemporal brain scales, and how such changes could lead to modulations of task performance in monkeys and humans. In monkeys performing an association learning task, social presence increased excitatory synaptic efficacy in attention-oriented regions dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex. In humans performing a visuomotor task, the presence of conspecifics facilitated performance in one of the subject groups, and this facilitation was linked to enhanced excitatory synaptic efficacy within the dorsal and ventral attention networks. While the scope of our findings is partially constrained by the limited number of participants, we propose that presence-induced improvements in task performance arise from attentional modulation mediated by changes in excitatory synaptic efficacy across three spatiotemporal brain scales, namely, micro-scale (single neurons), meso-scale (cortical columns) and macro-scale (whole-brain). Our findings from Bayesian learning converge to establish a granular, multi-scale framework for understanding the neural underpinnings of social presence effects. This probabilistic framework offers a fresh perspective on social presence research, and lays the groundwork for future investigations into the complex interplay between social presence, neural dynamics, and behavior.