Ketamine disrupts gaze patterns during face viewing in the common marmoset
bioRxiv Preprint Server February 16, 2021 Janahan Selvanayagam, Kevin D. Johnston, Raymond K. Wong et al. preprint
Faces are critical social signals for primates. The common marmoset is a promising model for studying face processing because its eye-movement and face-processing brain networks resemble those of macaques and humans. Face processing is often disrupted in conditions like schizophrenia. The drug ketamine, which blocks NMDA receptors, is used to model cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia. Four marmosets received either ketamine or saline while watching videos of other marmosets' faces (intact or scrambled). After ketamine, marmosets looked more at the snout than the eyes, and the pattern of where their gaze landed was no longer predictable from where it started, unlike after saline.