ePoster

Hippocampal representations during natural social behaviors in a bat colony

Saikat Ray,Itay Yona,Liora Las,Nachum Ulanovsky
COSYNE 2022(2022)
Lisbon, Portugal
Presented: Mar 19, 2022

Conference

COSYNE 2022

Lisbon, Portugal

Resources

Authors & Affiliations

Saikat Ray,Itay Yona,Liora Las,Nachum Ulanovsky

Abstract

Highly-social animals, like humans, live with many individuals, and interact with each other at times, locations and manner of their choosing. However, neurophysiological investigations of social responses are rarely conducted in such rich settings. To determine how the brain represents social information in a naturalistic setting – when the animals’ behavior is not experimentally constrained to a particular task – we constructed a bat cave for a colony of 5–10 bats of both sexes. The bats lived there 24×7, free to engage in any behaviors. Every day we conducted a ~3 hour experimental session, in which we tracked the bats’ identities, their 3D positions and their social interactions while recording from their dorsal CA1 hippocampal neurons. Based on behavioral data analysis, we found that sessions could be divided into three distinct and interleaved phases: (1) Social Interaction phase, (2) Flight phase, and (3) Sedentary phase. Preliminary results indicate that when bats interacted with each other, hippocampal neurons represented specific social events. During flight, we found social regulation of spatial representations – where the place-tuning of neurons was modulated by whether conspecifics were present at take-off or landing locations. During the sedentary phase on their roosts, we reasoned that the neurons could potentially track three broad categories of information: (i) self-position or head direction, (ii) allocentric locations of other bats, or (iii) egocentric information of direction and distance to other bats. We used generalized additive models (GAMs) to elucidate the contribution of these factors to neural spiking. Preliminary findings indicate that single neurons merge several streams of information, and often combine factors related to both self and others. Overall, we found that dorsal CA1 neurons combine complex social and spatial information to form an abstract representation of the natural world.

Unique ID: cosyne-22/hippocampal-representations-during-363a0119