Bayesian updating as a framework to predict the cognitive, neural and physiological mechanisms underlying social status

University Of California At Davis, Davis CA

Investigators

Abstract

Enter the text here that is the new abstract information for your application. This section must be no longer than 30 lines of text. Dominance rank is a major determinant of individual success. Dominance rank is gained or lost over the course of repeated social interactions generating hierarchies within groups. These dominance hierarchies are key features of all animal societies. While hierarchies are often stable, predicting an individual’s position within the hierarchy can be very difficult. This is in part because dominance rank can be influenced by numerous factors such as body size, inheritance and perhaps most importantly, previous experience. Considerable evidence highlights how an individual’s current success is strongly determined by their previous success: winners keep winning and losers keep losing. Our understanding of how and why these winner/loser effects occur is still limited, preventing our ability to explain and more importantly, predict why some interactions lead to predictable wins and others lead to upsets in contest outcomes. Here I propose to use a novel framework, Bayesian updating, to describe how individuals respond to dominance interactions throughout their lives. Bayesian updating is a computational mechanism whereby individuals can update their beliefs about the likelihood of a given outcome based on their previous (prior) information and the current information they are receiving. Bayesian updating mimics the inherent path-dependency of changes in dominance rank and offers a longer-term perspective on phenotypic change than current models. Here I will use this framework to make predictions about behavioral, neurological and physiological responses to accumulated contest defeats and successes over the lifetime. I will do this using a novel animal system, the Amazon molly. This naturally clonal vertebrate gives birth to independent offspring providing a unique opportunity to fully isolate the effects of previous experience on behavior, neural activation and hormonal pathways while controlling for genetic and inherited factors that also influence contest success. This work will improve our understanding of how previous experiences can ripple forward to influence current behavior which has implications for our ability to predict responses to behavioral and pharmacological interventions, for pathological or maladaptive behavior (e.g. bullying, PTSD) and can help understand behavioral change throughout the lifetime of individuals.