The multi-phase plasticity supporting winner effect
Aggression is an innate behavior across animal species. It is essential for competing for food, defending territory, securing mates, and protecting families and oneself. Since initiating an attack requires no explicit learning, the neural circuit underlying aggression is believed to be genetically and developmentally hardwired. Despite being innate, aggression is highly plastic. It is influenced by a wide variety of experiences, particularly winning and losing previous encounters. Numerous studies have shown that winning leads to an increased tendency to fight while losing leads to flight in future encounters. In the talk, I will present our recent findings regarding the neural mechanisms underlying the behavioral changes caused by winning.
Body Representation in Virtual Reality
How the brain represents the body is a fundamental question in cognitive neuroscience. Experimental studies are difficult because ‘the body is always there’ (William James). In recent years immersive virtual reality techniques have been introduced that deliver apparent changes to the body extending earlier techniques such as the rubber hand illusion, or substituting the whole body by a virtual one visually collocated with the real body, and seen from a normal first person perspective. This talk will introduce these techniques, and concentrate on how changing the body can change the mind and behaviour, especially in the context of combatting aggression based on gender or race.
Learning to aggress – Behavioral and circuit mechanisms of aggression reward
Aggression is an ethologically complex behavior with equally complex underlying mechanisms. Here, I present data on one form of aggression, appetitive or rewarding aggression, and the behavioral, cellular and system-level mechanisms guiding this behavior. First, I will present one way in which appetitive aggression is modeled in mice, and extend aggression motivation to the concept of compulsive aggression seeking and relapse. I will then briefly highlight recent advances in computer vision and machine learning for automated scoring of aggressive behavior, the role of specific cell-types in controlling aggression reward, and close with preliminary data on the whole brain aggression reward functional connectome using light sheet fluorescent microscopy (LSFM).
Molecular, receptor, and neural bases for chemosensory-mediated sexual and social behavior in mice
For many animals, the sense of olfaction plays a major role in controlling sexual behaviors. Olfaction helps animals to detect mates, discriminate their status, and ultimately, decide on their behavioral output such as courtship behavior or aggression. Specific pheromone cues and receptors have provided a useful model to study how sensory inputs are converted into certain behavioral outputs. With the aid of recent advances in tools to record and manipulate genetically defined neurons, our understanding of the neural basis of sexual and social behavior has expanded substantially. I will discuss the current understanding of the neural processing of sex pheromones and the neural circuitry which controls sexual and social behaviors and ultimately reproduction, by focusing on rodent studies, mainly in mice, and the vomeronasal sensory system.
Distinct limbic-hypothalamic circuits for the generation of social behaviors
The main pillars of social behaviors involve (1) mating, where males copulate with female partners to reproduce, and (2) aggression, where males fight conspecific male competitors in territory guarding. Decades of study have identified two key regions in the hypothalamus, the medial preoptic nucleus (MPN) and the ventrolateral part of ventromedial hypothalamus (VMHvl) , that are essential for male sexual and aggressive behaviors, respectively. However, it remains ambiguous what area directs excitatory control of the hypothalamic activity and generates the initiation signal for social behaviors. Through neural tracing, in vivo optical recording and functional manipulations, we identified the estrogen receptor alpha (Esr1)-expressing cells in the posterior amygdala (PA) as a main source of excitatory inputs to the MPN and VMHvl, and key hubs in mating and fighting circuits in males. Importantly, two spatially-distinct populations in the PA regulate male sexual and aggressive behaviors, respectively. Moreover, these two subpopulations in the PA display differential molecular phenotypes, projection patterns and in vivo neural responses. Our work also observed the parallels between these social behavior circuits and basal ganglia circuits to control motivated behaviors, which Larry Swanson (2000) originally proposed based on extensive developmental and anatomical evidence.
“DAS GEHIRN ALS ZENTRALE DER SOZIALEN BEZIEHUNGEN UND WENN ES NICHT MEHR NORMAL FUNKTIONIERT“
Das Gehirn als Zentrale der sozialen Beziehungen und wenn es nicht mehr normal funktioniert: Darüber erfahren wir mehr am Donnerstag, 18. März. Dabei steht die Gesundheitsförderung im Fokus, ebenso, wie unser Gehirn bei Aggression tickt und was daraus für die Prävention und Behandlung folgt.
Neural mechanisms of aggression
Aggression is an innate social behavior essential for competing for resources, securing mates, defending territory and protecting the safety of oneself and family. In the last decade, significant progress has been made towards an understanding of the neural circuit underlying aggression using a set of modern neuroscience tools. Here, I will talk about the history and recent progress in the study of aggression.