Sexually Dimorphic Amygdala Dysfunction in a Mouse Model of Global Cerebral Ischemia

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

Investigators

Abstract

Project Summary How does an animal decide when to help another individual? This question is fundamental to understanding how an individual modifies pro-social behaviors based on the context of a social situation, a feature often disrupted in neuropsychiatric disease. Past rodent research has investigated the mechanisms behind pro-social behavior; however, they focused on paradigms where animals do emotional state-matching or help an individual in distress. Therefore, our fundamental understanding of the mechanisms promoting pro-social behavior is biased towards negative affective states leaving a gap in our understanding of these decisions in positive affective states (e.g. helping others obtain rewards). The amygdala encodes valence, the goodness or badness of a stimuli, and is known to be involved in social decision making in negative affective states. Recent evidence points to amygdala activity being necessary for learning to help a conspecific gain a reward, but how amygdala neurons encode these prosocial decisions is unknown. Furthermore, which amygdala circuits may control these pro-social decisions in a changing social context also remains unknown. Using mice as a model and an established assay for pro-social decision making, this proposal will investigate the hypothesis that functional connectivity of the amygdala and prefrontal cortex flexibly modulates both pro-social helping behavior and individualistic behavior depending on the social context (e.g. conspecifics present). Thus, this study fills an important gap in our knowledge about the neural mechanisms mediating pro-social decision making across social contexts, and how necessary and sufficient functional connectivity between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex is to pro social or individualistic behavior.