Mouse strain and network-level activity differences underlie social decision-making

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Behavioral Neuroscience
• Computational Neuroscience

Background:

• Adaptive social behavior necessitates balancing self-interest with others' welfare.
• The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is implicated in prosocial behavior, but broader networks are unclear.
• Most studies use inbred mice, limiting understanding of genetic diversity in social decision-making.

Purpose of the Study:

• Investigate neural mechanisms underlying selfish versus prosocial choices.
• Examine how genetic background influences social decision-making.
• Identify distributed cortical-subcortical networks involved in social choice.

Main Methods:

• Used a social decision-making task in C57BL/6 and CD1 mice.
• Employed c-Fos mapping to assess neural activity across brain regions.
• Analyzed coordinated activity within prefrontal-subcortical circuits.

Main Results:

• CD1 mice showed a stronger bias toward selfish behavior; C57BL/6 mice were more prosocial.
• Elevated c-Fos activity in mPFC and nucleus accumbens core (NAcC) in CD1 mice.
• Distinct prefrontal-subcortical network configurations were recruited by prosocial and selfish individuals.

Conclusions:

• Social choice bias is encoded in distributed circuit organization, not just single regions.
• Genetic background significantly shapes neural implementation of social decisions.
• Identified strain-dependent differences in neural architecture for prosocial and selfish behavior.