Contributions of nonhuman primate research to unraveling the social brain and its impairments

The quality of human life depends in particular on the richness of social interactions. These interactions are made possible through the recognition and understanding of social signals and their conventions. This understanding is supported by social cognitive skills, which are recognized as one of the core functional domains that can be affected in neuropsychiatric, neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders. Disturbances of social cognition include impaired social perception, ineffective theory of mind, reduced empathy, or abnormal social behavior. From social perception to social cognition, all the way to social behaviors: research in non-human primate has been uniquely contributing towards identifying the neurobiological bases of social processes. In this review we highlight the relevance of these findings to our understanding of the workings of the social brain, with the goal of laying the foundation for developing better models of these impairments in patients and supplying human clinical neuroscience with valuable new hypotheses to understand how social mechanisms and access to them are disturbed in disease.