Topic: social behaviors

Multi-animal pose estimation is essential for studying animals' social behaviors in neuroscience and neuroethology. Advanced approaches have been proposed to support multi-animal estimation and achieve state-of-the-art performance. However, these models rarely exploit unlabeled data during training even though real-world applications have exponentially more unlabeled frames than labeled frames. Manually adding dense annotations for a large number of images is costly and labor-intensive, especially for multiple instances. To reduce the need for laborious human labeling, we propose a semi-superv

Social behaviors result from processing social cues (sensory cues from a partner) and producing actions relative to both the other’s behavior and one’s own internal state. How these two (social sensory cues and internal states) come together to drive behavior on a moment-to-moment basis is not yet clear. Here we fill this gap focusing on social interactions in Drosophila melanogaster. During courtship, males chase females and sing; female responses to male cues serve as critical feedback signals that shape the male’s ongoing behavior (Coen et al. 2014). In addition, we know that internal state

CCN2 is a matricellular protein that plays important roles in connective tissue. CCN2 is also expressed in the nervous system; however, its role is still unclear. To explore CCN2 function in the brain, we generated forebrain-specific Ccn2 knockout (FbCcn2 KO) mice. In this study, we examined the behavioral phenotypes of FbCcn2KO mice. Male mice lacking CCN2 in the forebrain exhibited normal locomotion, sensorimotor gating, and social behaviors but signs of anxiety and elevated reactive aggression. We checked the c-fos expression in aggression-related brain regions following the resident-intrud

Social interaction is a core aspect of mammalian behavior, and alterations in social behaviors are found across many neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions. Mice display a range of socioemotional behaviors and are commonly used as models to investigate the neuronal circuits and molecular mechanisms underlying differences in social behaviors. Analyzing social interactions in mice is often done by manual quantification of videos. Although multiple methods for automated tracking have been developed, reliable tracking and automated behavioral classification of multiple freely-moving unmarke

Motivated behaviors such as feeding, drinking, and social behaviors, and the ability to efficiently switch between them, are essential for survival. The lateral hypothalamus (LH) plays a central role in orchestrating motivated behaviors. As there is minimal local synaptic communication within the LH, long-range synaptic input is critical to LH neural computations. In particular, the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), which integrates complex information about the environment, projects to the LH. However, it is unknown when mPFC to LH projection neurons are active. In this study, we combine in vi

Chronic exposure to stressors is associated with the emergence of psychiatric disorders, but the underlying mechanisms are unclear. We previously showed that developmental chronic unpredictable stress (CUS) diminishes the habituation of dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) serotonergic (5-HT) neurons to acute stressors and enhances anxiety-like responses. Here, we investigated whether the change in 5-HT DRN habitution underlies CUS-induced behavioural alterations. We exposed larval zebrafish to the CUS, subsequently ablated DRN 5-HT neurons using chemogenetics and assessed different types of anxiety-lik