Sensory context gates oxytocin effects on auditory processing in macaques

Systemic oxytocin attenuates sound-evoked auditory responses in awake rhesus macaques during unimodal auditory tasks, but this attenuation disappears and responses increase in core/belt regions during audiovisual vocalizations.

• Why it matters: Oxytocin’s neural effects are inconsistent across studies, and it is unclear whether early sensory processing in primates depends on sensory context.
• What they did: Using high-resolution pharmacological fMRI in two awake rhesus macaques, the team compared systemic oxytocin versus saline during unimodal auditory and audiovisual tasks, including vocal and non-vocal sounds.
• The result: Oxytocin reduced evoked response magnitude across auditory core, belt, and associative regions in unimodal conditions while preserving decodable sound-category information, and it reorganized resting-state coupling and evoked response covariation across runs in a context-dependent way.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.