OBSERVATIONAL FEAR LEARNING AND SPATIAL NAVIGATION IN THE RETROSPLENIAL CORTEX OF HEAD-FIXED MICE

To survive, an animal must learn and remember the safety and threats of the daily environment. Animals live in social groups, which provide a clear advantage. They do not need to experience aversive events themselves, as observing conspecifics allows them to learn which situations are harmful and which maximize rewards. Learning from the pains and joys experienced by others partially depends on emotional contagion, defined as the sharing of an emotional state between conspecifics. To make appropriate decisions in daily life, animals must integrate information from both the social and non-social world (such as olfactory, visual, and sensory cues) into a single representation, referred to as the cognitive map. To investigate the neural correlates of these behaviors we developed a head-fixed observational fear learning paradigm combined with virtual reality combined with two-photon calcium imaging. Here we show that head-fixed mice can be conditioned through observational fear learning and show context-specific fear behavior. Two-photon calcium imaging of the retrosplenial cortex revealed place field like activity, with a subset of neurons showing modulation by observational fear learning. Together, these findings provide a novel experimental framework for studying how social information shapes spatial representations and identifies the retrosplenial cortex as a key region for mediating socially acquired spatial memory.