Familiarity

…Familiarity is an abstract concept that can readily generalize to any individual in any context. In contrast, social episodes consi

…two processes of social recognition - familiarity and recollection - remains unknown. We used microendoscopic calcium imaging to measure the activity of hippocampal dorsal CA2 pyramidal neurons (dCA2) - a region known for its importance in social memory - in mice interacting with novel and familiar conspecifics in different spatial contexts. Through a dec

Hippocampal replay, the sequential reactivation of place cells, is postulated to be a mechanism central to memory consolidation. Commonly studied using highly repeated stereotyped behaviours (e.g. running back and forth on a linear track), we don’t understand how such memories are formed in more naturalistic settings, with a single or limited exposure, and the effect on subsequent replay. To further investigate this, we trained rats to run back on forth on two novel linear tracks each day, each track limited to a fixed but different number of laps. Following a post-behaviour sleep session, rat

Animals often display prosocial behaviours, actions that benefit others, which are essential for social bonding and cooperation. Most studies on prosociality come from the Primate Order and have highlighted how features of the social context influence the expression of prosocial behavior, contributing to intraspecific and interspecific variation. However, less effort has been devoted to the detailed investigation of the behaviours of subjects, which is necessary to determine the proximate mechanisms through which the social context influences prosociality, across different species. To address

The literature suggests that ensemble coding, the ability to represent the gist of sets, may be an underlying mechanism for becoming familiar with newly encountered faces. This phenomenon was investigated by introducing a new training paradigm that involves incidental learning of target identities interspersed among distractors. The effectiveness of this training paradigm was explored in Study 1, which revealed that unfamiliar observers who learned the faces incidentally performed just as well as the observers who were instructed to learn the faces, and the intervening distractors did not disr

One challenge in exploring the internal representation of faces is the lack of controlled stimuli transformations. Researchers are often limited to verbalizable transformations in the creation of a dataset. An alternative approach to verbalization for interpretability is finding image-based measures that allow us to quantify image transformations. In this study, we explore whether PCA could be used to create controlled transformations to a face by testing the effect of these transformations on human perceptual similarity and on computational differences in Gabor, Pixel and DNN spaces. We found

…episodic details but also based on familiarity for an entire scene. I thus highlight current limitations in machine vision models emulating human recognition memory, with promising opportunities for future research. Moreover, we were interested in what observers