By Michelle Jaffee
What factors drive behavior that is in the interest of others, versus the kind that is selfish?
New preclinical findings by UF neuroscientists suggest it’s both genetic background and individual social preferences that influence brain networks involved in social decision-making.
Led by Nancy Padilla-Coreano, Ph.D., and Elizabeth Illescas-Huerta, Ph.D., researchers revealed that a certain mouse strain was more likely to make so-called “prosocial” choices, while another strain showed a stronger bent toward selfish behavior. The study was published in the journal eNeuro.
“We found that these behavioral differences were associated with distinct patterns of coordinated activity across brain networks, not just one brain region,” Illescas-Huerta said. “Our results give new insights into neural circuitry underlying selfish versus prosocial choices, an area that historically has been poorly understood.”
The study is the latest in a line of research by Padilla-Coreano’s lab examining forces that drive social behavior: in this case, personal gain versus the well-being of others.
Across species, prosocial choices help ensure the group’s survival, and in rodents, behaviors such as cooperation and helping others are studied to understand the neural basis of such decision-making.
In the new study, researchers began by adapting a novel social decision-making task and then tracked the effects of reward delivery to either both mice (prosocial) or only the subject mouse (selfish).
Meanwhile, the team used immunohistochemistry, a powerful microscope-based method for visualizing cellular components, to map brainwide neuronal activity during the task.
“We analyzed patterns of coordinated activity across brain regions to identify networks associated with different social decision-making strategies,” Illescas-Huerta said.
Despite using the same social-choice task, researchers found that brain network activity differed markedly between the two male mouse strains with opposing innate social preferences.
Moreover, there was coordinated activity across a prefrontal-striatal-midbrain circuit, with both the prosocial and selfish groups drawing upon different versions of this network.
“Our findings suggest that genetic background plays a role in how the brain coordinates social decision-making,” Padilla-Coreano said.
The next step, researchers said, is to record brain activity in real time across multiple regions during social decision-making, to better understand how the networks interact.