Oxytocin enhances gaze-following responses to videos of natural social behavior in adult male rhesus monkeys

Highlights • Gaze following behaviors, a behavior foundational to social cognition, can be reliably elicited by naturalistic video stimuli using rhesus monkeys in laboratory settings. • Oxytocin (OT), previously demonstrated to enhance pro-social behaviors across several species, robustly increases the frequency of gaze following behaviors in rhesus monkeys. • Increased time spent viewing eyes was observed using presentation of static images, but not videos, suggesting gaze following behaviors provide a robust metric for the effects of OT, and thus may be utilized for future experiments exploring the neural mechanisms of OT in primate models.