Social cognition

Recent articles

Hitting city streets to record rat behaviors: Q&A with Emily Mackevicius, Ralph Peterson

Capturing the rodents’ vocalizations and movements in the wild offers an opportunity to study naturalistic behaviors in a complex urban environment, Mackevicius and Peterson say.

By Marta Hill
19 August 2025 | 7 min listen
Two rhesus macaque monkeys.

Vasopressin boosts sociability in solitary monkeys

Inhaling the hormone did not increase aggression in unsociable rhesus macaques and appears to help the animals remember faces and reciprocate friendly behaviors.

By Charles Q. Choi
25 November 2024 | 5 min read
Three rhesus macaque monkeys.

Monkeys’ amygdala cells adapt to social status

The cells’ activity reflects social hierarchies and may enable flexible behavior.

By Angie Voyles Askham
6 November 2024 | 4 min read
Two surreal heads touch each other’s faces.

The case for redefining ‘theory of mind’: Q&A with François Quesque

In a new commentary, Quesque and 44 experts in neuroscience and psychology propose a standardized lexicon for research on the attribution of mental states.

By Lauren Schenkman
10 October 2024 | 7 min read
Stock photograph of a women and her young child at a clinician’s office.

A genetics-first clinic for catching developmental conditions early: Q&A with Jacob Vorstman

A new clinic is assessing children who have a genetic predisposition for autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions—sometimes before traits appear.

By Lauren Schenkman
15 August 2024 | 7 min read
Mice socialize in an enclosure

Neurons in thalamus sort new social cues from familiar ones

A subset of thalamic neurons support an aspect of social behavior called social recognition, according to experiments in mice.

By Katie Moisse
20 June 2023 | 4 min read

Explore more from The Transmitter

Research image visualizing genetic variation.

Long-read sequencing unearths overlooked autism-linked variants

Strips that are thousands of base pairs in length offer better resolution of structural variants and tandem repeats, according to two independent preprints.

By Natalia Mesa
18 September 2025 | 6 min read
Illustration of human figures holding brightly colored connected dots.

This paper changed my life: Dan Goodman on a paper that reignited the field of spiking neural networks

Friedemann Zenke’s 2019 paper, and its related coding tutorial SpyTorch, made it possible to apply modern machine learning to spiking neural networks. The innovation reinvigorated the field.

By Dan Goodman
17 September 2025 | 5 min read
Research image of different types of microglia in mice.

Autism and anxiety insights; and more

Here is a roundup of autism-related news and research spotted around the web for the week of 15 September.

By Jill Adams
16 September 2025 | 2 min read

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