Disambiguating networks and factors that promote social transmission of information in rats

日常生活中充斥着各种来源的信息。但是，个人如何从那些可以或应该被忽视的信息中辨别出重要的信息呢？大多数关于人类和其他动物学习的研究都集中在通过第一手经验获得信息的模型上。然而，直接接触事件并不是个人收集知识或形成记忆的唯一方式。有证据表明，人类和其他灵长类动物可以通过观察他人或与他人互动，从社会背景中发展出恐惧联想。例如，一个人可能对蛇有强烈的恐惧，尽管他从未见过活蛇。在当今社会，目睹创伤事件和间接获得恐惧的可能性因技术的无所不在和不断获得新闻和社交媒体而放大。像人类一样，老鼠是非常社会化的动物，学会通过与其他老鼠的互动来推断有关其环境的信息。PI的实验室最近开发了一种程序，通过这种程序，老鼠通过社会传播获得恐惧（一种称为代理恐惧条件反射的模型）。代理恐惧条件反射提供了一种敏感的方法来研究社会信息如何在个体之间传递。另一个不同的模型，食物偏好的社会传播，允许研究人员研究食欲或奖励信息的传播。通过并行执行两个不同的和互补的范式（恐惧条件反射的代理和食物偏好的社会传播），研究人员将能够隔离的因素，选择性地从那些特定于一个给定的范式的信息的社会传播的基础。这一点很重要，因为确定社会和机械因素有助于人们如何获得恐惧，也可能导致消除或减少社会获得的恐惧的干预措施。该项目的目标是确定促进物种成员之间信息传递的社会因素和神经机制，并确定是什么导致了个体通过社会传播学习的倾向的广泛变化。首先，研究人员将确定因素（例如，优势地位，亲属关系），促进社会传播的信息，使用两个互补的行为范式：恐惧制约的代理和社会传播的食物偏好。其次，研究人员将使用一种复杂的技术来消除对信息社会传播所特有的神经网络的歧义，以及那些通过直接经验学习的神经网络，该技术允许在特定时间选择性标记参与给定任务的细胞。第三，研究人员将测试他们的预测，即外侧下丘脑中的特定细胞群通过代理和食物偏好的社会传播来解释恐惧条件反射的个体差异。该项目结合了复杂和彻底的行为测试，以及补充的细胞和解剖方法，以解决驱动行为差异的神经机制。这些技术的优势在于它们将提供高空间和时间分辨率，同时允许对行为进行持续采样，以了解知识是如何在个体之间传递的。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

Everyday life abounds with information from a multitude of sources. But how do individuals discern important information from that which can or should be disregarded? Most of the research on learning in humans and other animals has focused on models in which information is acquired via first-hand experience. Direct exposure to an event, however, is not the only way that individuals gather knowledge or form memories. Evidence suggests that humans and other primates can develop fear associations from a social context, by observing or interacting with others. For example, a person may have an intense fear of snakes despite having never come across a live snake. In today's society, the likelihood of witnessing traumatic episodes and indirectly acquiring fear is magnified by the omnipresence of technology and constant access to the news and social media. Like humans, rats are very social animals and learn to infer information about their environment through their interactions with other rats. The PI's laboratory has recently developed a procedure by which rats acquire fear through social transmission (a model called fear conditioning by proxy). Fear conditioning by proxy provides a sensitive means of examining how social information is transferred between individuals. A different model, social transmission of food preference, allows the investigators to examine the transmission of appetitive or rewarding information. By executing the two different and complementary paradigms in parallel (fear conditioning by proxy and social transmission of food preference), the investigators will be able to isolate factors that selectively underlie social transmission of information from those which are specific to a given paradigm. This is important, because identifying the social and mechanistic factors contribute to how people acquire fear could also lead to interventions that extinguish or diminish fears that are socially acquired.The objective of the project is to identify the social factors and neural mechanisms that foster transmission of information between members of a species, and determine what accounts for the broad variability in individuals' propensity to learn via social transmission. First, the investigators will identify factors (e.g., dominance status, kinship) that promote social transmission of information using two complementary behavioral paradigms: fear conditioning by proxy and social transmission of food preference. Second, the investigators will disambiguate the neural networks that are unique to social transmission of information, and those that are shared with learning through direct experience, using a sophisticated technique that allows selective labeling of cells involved in a given task at a specific time. Third, the investigators will test their prediction that a specific population of cells in the lateral hypothalamus accounts for individual differences in fear conditioning by proxy and social transmission of food preference. This project combines sophisticated and thorough behavioral tests, as well as complementary cellular and anatomical methods to address the neural mechanisms that drive behavioral differences. A strength of these techniques is that they will provide high spatial and temporal resolution, while allowing for on-going sampling of behavior, to understand how knowledge is transferred between individuals.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.