Social reactivation of fear engrams enhances memory recall

For group-living animals, the social environment provides salient experience that can weaken or strengthen aspects of cognition such as memory recall. Although the cellular substrates of individually acquired fear memories in the dentate gyrus (DG) and basolateral amygdala (BLA) have been well-studied and recent work has revealed circuit mechanisms underlying the encoding of social experience, the processes by which social experience interacts with an individual’s memories to alter recall remain unknown. Here we show that stressful social experiences enhance the recall of previously acquired fear memories in male but not female mice, and that social buffering of conspecifics’ distress blocks this enhancement. Activity-dependent tagging of cells in the DG during fear learning revealed that these ensembles were endogenously reactivated during the social experiences in males, even after extinction. These reactivated cells were shown to be functional components of engrams, as optogenetic stimulation of the cells active during the social experience in previously fear-conditioned and not naïve animals was sufficient to drive fear-related behaviors. Taken together, our findings suggest that social experiences can reactivate preexisting engrams to thereby strengthen discrete memories.