# Unraveling neuronal circuits and causal underpinnings of long time-scale social strategic behaviors

> **NIH NIH DP2** · STANFORD UNIVERSITY · 2020 · $2,365,500

## Abstract

Successful social exchanges, from date nights to peace talks, fundamentally rely on coordination and trust
between individuals who have different goals or preferences. Such conflict between individual goals can
be harmonized by long-time-scale strategies, such as turn-taking behaviors. However, this requires
establishing the trust that forgoing preference will be reciprocated in the future. Indeed, building trust
and preserving long-timescale social coordination that is essential for forming and maintaining
relationships is achieved by flexible, dynamic re-evaluation of the other’s behavior and renegotiation
processes of navigating preference distances. Recent evidence suggests that the implicit processes of
interpersonal coordination are closely related to the core impairments in psychiatric disorders such as
Autism. Despite the immense importance of trust and strategic social coordination to both normal and
abnormal cognition and our existence as a society, its single-neuronal basis and causal underpinnings
remain almost completely unknown. While this level of cellular and mechanistic investigation is not readily
accessible in humans, non-human primates, who closely model human social cognition, are particularly
powerful model for understanding the implementations of core neuronal computations underlying
human strategic social interactions. Here, we leverage principles of game theory to provide a novel
framework that operationally encapsulates long-term social coordination, and adapt it to be compatible
with neurophysiological investigation in primates. Equipped with these non-human primate models of
social interaction, large-scale single-neuron recordings across multiple brain regions, and advanced
mathematical modeling approaches my goal is to systematically dissect the brain-wide neuronal
underpinnings of social coordination. Key to this effort is developing and implementing new tools for
large-volume, long-term use compatible, spatially specific and temporally precise perturbation in
primates through the use of new generation neural effectors. With these new precision-perturbations we
will simultaneously investigate the contributions of the proposed major hubs of the “social brain” in
encoding and modulating trust and strategic social coordination. Understanding gleaned from this work
will illuminate the neural architecture and circuits mediating trust and strategic social coordination. Given
that impaired interpersonal coordination is associated with various neurological and psychiatric disorders
(such as autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia), these results also will help set the path to
transform clinical treatments for widespread neurological and psychiatric medically-intractable disorders.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10003074
- **Project number:** 1DP2MH126142-01
- **Recipient organization:** STANFORD UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Keren Haroush
- **Activity code:** DP2 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $2,365,500
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2020-09-15 → 2025-05-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10003074

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10003074, Unraveling neuronal circuits and causal underpinnings of long time-scale social strategic behaviors (1DP2MH126142-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10003074. Licensed CC0.

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