NSF Award
2310626
Some animals live in large communities comprised mostly of individuals that are not related to them. In these cases, animals will interact daily with unrelated individuals (e.g. friends, acquaintances, or strangers) across various social settings. Individuals that successfully navigate group living are considered prosocial compared to antisocial individuals that do not navigate group living with great success. Despite the importance of successful group social interaction, little is known about how the brain promotes prosocial behavior to allow individuals to enter a new social group and maintain group cohesion. The answers to these questions remain unknown because most neuroscience studies examine social behaviors between just two individuals that are either related (e.g. parent-offspring) or mates. For most animals, however, social interactions often occur in complex settings. This project uses a unique animal model, the spiny mouse, which lives in large mixed-sex groups comprised of related and unrelated individuals. This research will determine how the brain promotes initiation of contact with a new group, facilitates positive interactions with new groups members, and reinforces positive behaviors that enable group stability. Insights gained from this research will be foundational for examining how the brain promotes successful navigation of complex social environments and how individuals are able to thrive in groups, maintaining healthy relationships leading to stable communities. The studies will also incorporate outreach programs to work with children and adults at science festivals and develop a new outreach program called "After Dark" which will be a museum-based program that highlights group living animals.<br/><br/><br/>The brain can organize adaptive behavioral responses to complex social environments, yet we know little about how this is achieved, particularly when the social environment is a complex society of numerous interacting individuals. Indeed, within the realm of social neuroscience, most studies probe neural circuits underlying dyadic interactions. As a result, we know very little about how the brain modulates behavior in group contexts. To respond to an ever-changing social environment, central brain “hubs” are likely necessary for organizing systematic responses to dynamic inputs. The paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus (PVN) is a multifunctional region that modulates physiological processes and behaviors that range from affiliation and parental care to aggression and anxiety. Although we know the PVN can produce numerous outputs, the downstream targets that the PVN acts on to produce them is less well understood. This project will test the hypothesis that hypothalamic suppression of fear neural circuitry facilitates indiscriminate social approach behavior to allow for the formation of new groups, and that hypothalamic promotion of reward circuit-mediated behavior reinforces affiliation in complex social environments to facilitate group cohesion. The researchers will use chemo- and functional-genetic approaches, along with a novel organism – the highly social spiny mouse – to identify neural circuits that promote social cohesion in complex groups. DREADDs and fiber photometry will be paired with machine learning and social network analysis of complex groups that will produce a neurobehavioral dataset that will provide insight into the brain mechanisms that make group living possible.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
