Michael L Platt
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Neuroscience
How does a brain produce behavior that fits the social situation it is in — knowing when to cooperate, when to defer, when to pay attention to someone else? Social competence of this kind shapes health: support networks help people stick to hard treatments, while disrupted social thinking worsens depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and the challenges of living with HIV.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
social neuroscience
social cognition
macaque
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Develop gene therapy methods to deliver ultra-sensitive light-responsive proteins (opsins) safely across large volumes of the macaque brain, overcoming the size and immune barriers that have limited optogenetics in primates.
- Build chronically implantable, ultra-thin flexible LED arrays together with implantable battery-powered drivers, so that light-based control of neurons can run wirelessly in monkeys moving freely during natural behavior.
- Record wirelessly from multiple freely moving monkeys at the same time as they interact in varied social contexts, pairing neural data with computer-vision quantification of social behavior.
- Test which neural circuits are necessary for appropriate social behavior, using pharmacological manipulations and reversible perturbations of neural activity in interacting monkeys.
- Test the two-stage model separating processes that establish social context from those that guide social control, using primate electrophysiology alongside human electrophysiology and neuroimaging with parallel tasks.
- Determine how social relationships and the complexity of the social environment change decision making, analyzing monkey and human behavior with shared computational models.
More about the research
Three projects attack this question from complementary angles: building the tools needed to manipulate specific brain cells in freely moving monkeys, recording from several monkeys at once as they interact, and testing a general computational account of how social context shapes decisions in both monkeys and humans.
Why it matters
Social competence breaks down in schizophrenia, depression, anxiety and in people living with HIV, yet its brain basis is poorly understood because most experiments study restrained animals alone. Mapping the circuits that match behavior to social context could identify targets for treating these conditions. Separately, the optogenetic tools being built for large primate brains could be applied directly as cell-type-specific therapy for neurological disorders that affect particular neural populations, such as focal epilepsy.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Najib Majaj
New York University, NY·Neuroscience
Compare neural computations and behavioral algorithms in macaques foraging head-free in a foraging room with those during head-fixed navigation in virtual reality, to test whether restrained lab conditions differ from naturalistic ones.
Adam Mar
New York University, NY·Neuroscience
Increase the capacity of continuous home-cage behavioral monitoring of mice, raising the number of animals tracked per cage and improving the pipeline that collects and analyzes video data.
Joshua I Gold
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Neuroscience
Develop and test a mathematical theory of adaptive decision bounds that update during deliberation, using behavioral experiments in humans and combined behavioral and neural studies in monkeys making decisions under changing conditions.
The school
University of Pennsylvania: 90 labs on PI Pages, $2.2B a year on research, 750 research doctorates a year.
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