Decoding the Brain: How Does the Brain Define Social Intelligence in Primates?

Overview

Whether greeting a friend with a handshake or a polite “Hello,” social intelligence has defined the social structure and hierarchies amongst several primate species, ranging from humans to macaques. Interestingly, social intelligence is heavily intertwined with familiarity and memory function in the brain. Though individuals spend their entire lives collecting social knowledge to navigate their perspective of the 3D world, there has yet to be a comprehensive analysis of the human brain through a coding scheme. Our research team has obs erved the social hierarchies in rhesus macaques, a closely related ancestor to humans, through an intensive video -logging video metric. I hypothesized that the social distribution across two primate groups would vary by kinship and the number of female mon keys present. So far, our observational data has refuted my hypothesis that a male primate is often the highest-ranking primate within a social group. Our results did not support that female macaque mothers with stronger parent-child relationships are more likely to be dominating or aggressive. Therefore, it may be that maternity amongst female primates does not remarkably factor into aggression or social dominance. With further research, we can learn to which extent rhesus macaque monkeys perceive animals across different levels of familiarity and how far social relations play into their memory. We hope to find a way to decode the brain's abstract neural system and better understand how social intelligence presents itself in primate social groups. This plac es the novel creations of sensory technology or advanced AI technology into the foreseeable future.

Competition history

• JSHS 2025 Category not listed

Resources

• National JSHS abstract book ↗

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