Many of the natural behaviours of primates that sustain their dynamic social relationships are not captured in artificial laboratory tasks. Testard et al. addressed this issue by assessing neural activity in unrestrained socially interacting rhesus macaques, identifying cortical signatures of several key natural and co-operative behaviours.

The authors combined ethological analysis and computer vision with wireless neural recordings from two cortical areas that are presumed to be involved in the hierarchical processing of social information: area TEO, known to be involved in visual processing and the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC), known to be involved in cognitive processing. This allowed them to capture social behavioural dynamics during natural behaviour and the underlying neural signatures of hundreds of neurons.