Factors Modulating the Effects of Juvenile Social Isolation on Adult Social Behavior in Rodents

For decades, rodent social isolation models have been used to explore how social experience influences brain maturation and adult behavioral outcomes, but studies employing these models have produced seemingly inconsistent experimental results. Here, we provide a comprehensive overview of the effects of social isolation during development on adult social behavior, highlighting how differences in experimental paradigms (including the duration and timing of isolation, the sex of subjects, and whether subjects are returned to social housing prior to testing) can help explain disparate experimental results across the four most-studied types of social behaviors in rodent social isolation research (social preference, social investigation, agonistic behavior, and social recognition). Our analysis shows that experimental results are not as inconsistent as they may seem at first glance and that understanding the nuances of rodent social isolation paradigms is necessary for the field to be able to leverage these models to discover the neural mechanisms underlying experience-dependent shaping of social behavior.