Distinct Brain Electrical Activity Patterns in Dominant and Submissive Mice: Implications for Cognitive Impairments

The prefrontal, visual, and posterior parietal cortices are key to cognition, social interaction, and novelty recognition, but the impact of social hierarchy and inherent stress sensitivity on their interplay remains underexplored. Our findings reveal significant neural differences between stress-resilient dominant (Dom) and stress-sensitive submissive (Sub) mice, particularly in theta band power, inter-regional coherence, and phase-amplitude coupling. Dom mice exhibited reduced theta coherence and dynamic changes in theta-gamma phase amplitude coupling between the prefrontal and visual cortices, which were associated with better memory recall and cognitive flexibility. In addition, Dom mice showed increased left-to-right visual cortex connectivity during the recognition task, linked to successful novelty discrimination, while Sub mice lacked this theta-driven causality. These results suggest that stress sensitivity associated with social rank alters neural activity and connectivity, contributing to the differing performance of Dom and Sub mice in novelty recognition tasks, providing potential diagnostic and therapeutic implications for targeting theta-driven connectivity.