Experience-dependent tuning of socially selective neural circuits

项目摘要 正确认识和回应社会伙伴是指导每个社会活动的基本原则。 从单细胞到人类的相互作用。众所周知，社会环境与发展相互作用， 典型的行为反应，然而，社会经验塑造发展的机制 而调节神经系统的特征以引起这些行为仍然知之甚少。如何 在整个发育过程中，社会环境是否相互作用，以塑造大脑如何编码， 歧视社会信息？拟议的研究解决了这些问题，在一个新的实验 研究神经回路社会发展的一个易于操作的系统，北方纸蜂，Polistes 褐色的P. fuscatus女性有高度不同的颜色标记在他们的脸上，他们用来区分 社会伙伴通过视觉。像人类一样，P. fuscatus黄蜂将面部视为特殊的视觉对象， 这种专门的识别能力的发展依赖于社会经验。这些人的社交生活 黄蜂是丰富和复杂的，允许高度完善的社会记忆，甚至传递推理的社会 关系。方便的是，黄蜂在成虫出现之前不具有成像眼睛。这把钥匙 该功能允许精确控制社交体验的时间和多样性， 维持幼虫正常发育。此外，我们最近发现了一个共同的人口社会 反应神经元在中央大脑的P. fuscatus，这表明选择性调谐到视觉刺激的向前- 在其他视觉对象之上面对黄蜂，类似于灵长类动物大脑中的“面部细胞”。这些细胞编码 社会检测和身份歧视，提供了一个明确的神经目标，研究社会经验如何 塑造了社会选择性电路的调谐特征。拟议的实验利用了 这一系统的独特优势，在三个层面上解决这个问题。首先，我们将评估这些电路 受到长期社会孤立的影响。其次，我们将跟踪这些发展的调整轨迹， 电路，以确定这些电路如何发展，并通过成熟完善，以产生高度 在成熟的成年黄蜂中发现的选择性特征。第三，我们将研究个体神经和 种群水平的调谐特征受到黄蜂社会经验多样性的影响， 操纵群体之间的面部多样性。这些实验将有助于发现 社会回路是如何通过社会经验调整的，并指导未来的实验，以确定共同的原则 引导社会认知。此外，该奖项还将支持获奖者向独立的 在研究型大学的研究生涯，并支持他们的实验室研究的建立 社会经验如何塑造社会认知之下的回路的发展。

PROJECT SUMMARY Appropriately recognizing and responding to social partners is a fundamental principle guiding every social interaction from single cells to humans. Social environment is known to interact with development to give rise to typical behavioral responses, however the mechanisms by which social experience shapes the development and tuning features of the nervous system to give rise to these behaviors remains poorly understood. How does the social environment throughout development interact to shape how the brain encodes and discriminates social information? The proposed research addresses these questions in a novel experimentally tractable system for investigating social development of a neural circuit, the northern paper wasp, Polistes fuscatus. P. fuscatus females have highly diverse color markings on their face which they use to discriminate social partners via vision alone. Like humans, P. fuscatus wasps treat faces as special visual objects and the development of this specialized recognition ability is dependent on social experience. The social lives of these wasps are rich and complex, allowing for highly refined social memory and even transitive inference of social relationships. Conveniently, wasps do not possess image forming eyes prior to adult emergence. This key feature allows for the ability to precisely control both the timing and diversity of social experience, while maintaining normal larval development. Further, we have recently discovered a common population of socially responsive neurons in the central brain of P. fuscatus, which show selective tuning to visual stimuli of forward- facing wasps above other visual objects, analogous to the ‘face cells’ in the primate brain. These cells encode both social detection and identity discrimination, providing a clear neural target to study how social experience shapes the tuning features of a socially selective circuits. The proposed experiments take advantage of the unique strengths of this system to address this question at three levels. First, we will assess how these circuits are impacted by long-term social isolation. Second, we will track the developmental tuning trajectory of these circuits to identify how these circuits develop and are refined through maturity to give rise to the highly selective features found in mature adult wasps. Third, we will investigate how both individual neural and population-level tuning features are affected by the diversity of social experiences wasps have, via manipulation of facial diversity among groups. These experiments will aid in discovering fundamental features of how social circuits are tuned via social experience and guide future experiments to identify shared principles guiding social cognition. Further this award will also support the awardee’s transition to an independent research career at a research-intensive university and support the establishment of their laboratory studying how social experience shapes the development of circuits underlying social cognition.