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Authors & Affiliations
Cristina Mazuski, Lennart Oettl, Chenyue Ren, John O'Keefe
Abstract
Recognizing and remembering social conspecifics is crucial for the survival of an organism, but it remains unclear how this information is represented in the brain. Previously, we identified populations of basolateral amygdala (BLA) neurons in the freely-moving rat that were highly tuned to distinct naturalistic stimuli such as male or female conspecifics and food. These neuronal populations showed stable reactivation across multiple presentations of stimuli in the same environment. To understand whether experience can modify this social representation, we recorded from large populations of neurons in the rat amygdala and surrounding areas using 4-shank Neuropixels probes to test how social representation changes following a positive or negative experience.We trained implanted rats to associate one male conspecific with a food reward and another with a mildly aversive loud tone in a go/no-go task. A third ‘neutral’ male conspecific was not presented during the task. To understand how this experience affected social representation during naturalistic behavior, rats were allowed to freely interact with the three male conspecifics before and after learning their associated valence. During free interaction immediately after training, we observed changes in the neuronal responses to the three male conspecifics. In the amygdala, social representation changed most in the valenced animals compared to the third neutral male conspecific. In contrast, in surrounding areas including the endopiriform and piriform cortex, animals that were associated with positive and negative experiences were represented differently. These results suggest that neurons in the amygdala and surrounding areas play different roles in representing social value.