Neural and Molecular Substrates of Social Competence

群居动物拥有复杂的认知能力，能够评估、评价和回应各种社交暗示。这些社交能力使个人能够根据自己的社会地位和互动表现出灵活的行为，这就是众所周知的社交能力。尽管对社交能力的重要性有详细的了解，但对调节这种能力的神经和分子机制知之甚少。了解反应是如何调节的，将提供对社会反应的基本理解，包括典型和非典型反应，并最终允许预测个人的具体反应。这项研究使用了一种有趣的模型系统来解决这些问题--非洲须鱼--伯顿拟罗非鱼。这些鱼具有高度的社会性，表现出非凡的认知能力，甚至可以利用已知的关系来推断未知的关系，从而暂时性地推断其他人的社会地位。这项研究将为本科生和研究生提供神经科学方面的培训机会，并为他们在科学领域的职业生涯和面向公众的宣传做好准备。这项研究的具体目标是识别与社交能力有关的神经回路、分子信号和调节机制。该提议假设，多巴胺通过D2受体发挥作用，调节神经社会网络，增强社会能力。多巴胺在编码社会刺激的奖赏属性方面发挥着特别重要的作用，并被认为调节有动机的、目标导向的行为。研究人员将行为、神经解剖学、药理学和基因组学方法结合起来，以发现(1)动物如何对微妙的社会信息做出反应；(2)社会信息如何在短时间尺度上重新连接神经电路；(3)对多巴胺能途径的操纵如何控制行为灵活性；以及(4)社会信息和多巴胺能系统如何相互作用，影响基因组活动。到目前为止的结果表明，不仅个人对社会刺激的反应因社会环境而异，而且操纵多巴胺能奖励系统的行为效果也因环境而异。鉴于控制社会行为的神经网络在所有脊椎动物中都非常保守，计划中的研究结果将对包括人类在内的社会动物的大脑如何感知和回应其社会环境产生深远的影响。

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.