Asymmetric Social Representations in the Prefrontal Cortex for Cooperative Behavior.

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Behavioral Biology
• Computational Neuroscience

Background:

• Cooperation is crucial for social species, often involving distinct social roles like leaders and followers.
• The neural underpinnings of role-based cooperative coordination are not well understood.
• Understanding these mechanisms is key to deciphering social cognition and collective behavior.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the neural basis of cooperation and social role dynamics in mice.
• To explore how the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) contributes to cooperative decision-making.
• To identify neural computations underlying real-time adjustments in social behavior.

Main Methods:

• Developed a novel spatial foraging task for pairs of mice exhibiting natural leader-follower roles.
• Utilized disruption of medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) activity to assess its role in cooperation.
• Employed calcium imaging to monitor neural activity in the mPFC.
• Applied a multi-agent inverse reinforcement learning framework to model decision-making.

Main Results:

• Disruption of mPFC activity, especially in followers, impaired cooperation and altered cue weighting.
• The mPFC encodes leadership dynamics and a role-specific social value map of the partner's location.
• Latent value functions guiding cooperative decisions were identified and decoded from mPFC activity.

Conclusions:

• Social roles dynamically shape decision-making through neural computations in the mPFC.
• The mPFC plays a critical role in coordinating cooperative behavior based on social context.
• This research provides insights into the neural basis of social cognition and collective action.