Neural and Molecular Substrates of Social Competence

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Social animals possess sophisticated cognitive abilities for assessing, evaluating, and responding to a wide range of social cues. These social abilities allow individuals to display flexible behavior based on their social status and interactions, which is known as social competence. Despite the detailed understanding of importance of social competence little is known about the mechanisms, neural and molecular, that regulate this ability. Knowledge of how responses are regulated will provide essential understanding of social response, both typical and atypical, and allow ultimately for predictions about specific responses by individuals. The research uses an interesting model system to address these questions the African cichlid fish, Astatotilapia burtoni. These fish are highly social and display extraordinary cognitive abilities, and can even use known relationships to deduce unknown ones to infer the social rank of other individuals transitively. This research will provide opportunities to train undergraduate and graduate students in neuroscience and prepare them for careers in science and outreach to the general public.The specific goal of this research is cichlid fish to identify the neural circuitry, molecular signaling, and regulatory mechanisms involved in social competence. The proposal hypothesizes that dopamine acting through the D2 receptor mediates the neural social network potentiating social competence. Dopamine plays a particularly important role in encoding the rewarding properties of social stimuli and is known to modulate motivated, goal-directed behavior. The researchers integrate behavioral, neuroanatomical, pharmacological and genomic approaches to discover (1) how animals behave in response to subtle social information; (2) how social information rewires neural circuits on a short time scale; (3) how manipulation of the dopaminergic pathway governs behavioral flexibility; and (4) how social information and the dopaminergic system interact to affect genome activity. The results thus far suggest that not only do individuals respond to a social stimulus differently depending on the social context, but that the behavioral effects of manipulating the dopaminergic reward system also differ across contexts. Given that the neural networks governing social behavior are remarkably conserved across all vertebrates, the results of the planned research will have far-reaching implications for how the brains of social animals, including humans, perceive and respond to their social environment.