The ability to recognize individuals is common in animals; however, we know little about why the phenotypic variability necessary for individual recognition has evolved in some animals but not others. One possibility is that natural selection favours variability in some social contexts but not in others. Polistes fuscatus wasps have variable facial and abdominal markings used for individual rec...

Oxytocin (OT) knock-out mice fail to recognize familiar conspecifics after repeated social exposures, despite normal olfactory and spatial learning abilities. OT treatment fully restores social recognition. Here we demonstrate that OT acts in the medial amygdala during the initial exposure to facilitate social recognition. OT given before, but not after, the initial encounter restores social re...

For the natural and social interaction it is necessary to understand human behavior. Personality is one of the fundamental aspects, by which we can understand behavioral dispositions. It is evident that there is a strong correlation between users’ personality and the way they behave on online social network (e.g., Facebook). This paper presents automatic recognition of Big-5 personality traits ...

Puberty prepares mammals to sexually reproduce during adolescence. It is also hypothesized to invoke a social metamorphosis that prepares adolescents to take on adult social roles. We provide the first evidence to support this hypothesis in humans and show that pubertal development retunes the face-processing system from a caregiver bias to a peer bias. Prior to puberty, children exhibit enhanc...

Objectives and Contributions This chapter informs one aspect of what makes societies successful: social inclusion. My focus is social recognition and cultural citizenship – who fits in, who belongs, who is “us” and who is “them.” Societies that are inclusive are societies that make room for the social recognition of a variety of groups. They are societies that sustain competing definitions of a...

While pheromones may act as social memory signals, oxytocin and vasopressin acting in the brain appear to be critical for the neural processing of olfactory signatures used for social discrimination. Evidence from a variety of laboratories using a range of animal models, as well as an array of molecular and pharmacological techniques, have helped to determine the neuroanatomical and functional ...

Social cognition impairments are pervasive in the frontotemporal dementias (FTD). These deficits would be triggered by (a) basic emotion and face recognition processes as well as by (b) higher level social cognition (e.g., theory of mind, ToM). Both emotional processing and social cognition impairments have been previously reported in the behavioral variant of FTD (bvFTD) and also in other vers...

Evidence is here summarized that animal species belonging to distant taxa show forms of social recognition, a sophisticated cognitive ability adaptive in most social interactions. The paper then proceeds to review evidence of functional lateralization for this cognitive ability. The main focus of this review is evidence obtained in domestic chickens, the animal model employed in the authors’ la...