Brains in context: Social influences on neurophysiology and reproductive behaviour in songbirds

在包括人类在内的许多物种中，社会环境影响着生理、行为甚至进化。然而，在自然科学中，对社会行为的机械基础的研究缺乏一个易于处理的实验模型系统，该系统可以捕捉到介导个体之间复杂相互作用的各种神经、生理和行为过程。在过去的十年里，我和我的学生一直在研究和实验性地操纵一种群居鸣禽的社会行为：褐头燕八哥。我们能够实验性地操纵生活在大型户外鸟舍中的鸟类群体的社会背景，现在我们也能够通过对个体进行神经操纵来实验性地控制个体的社会倾向，然后研究它们在社会群体中的生活，互动和繁殖。这项提案中的工作使用这种范式（操纵个体的社会特征，并在他们生活在大群体中时对其进行测试）来研究神经机制如何创造行为表型，这些个体特征如何影响社交网络，以及反过来，社交网络如何改变个体的行为表型甚至他们的大脑。患有神经病变的女性受试者将被引入大型户外鸟舍，受试者可以在复杂的社会环境中生活和繁殖。被操纵的雌性有时会作为实验对象（例如，测试它们的交配模式，繁殖能力，以及后代的健康和生存能力），但有时它们也会作为社会环境，创造其他个体发展的文化（例如，与幼年雄性和幼年雌性燕八哥互动，从而影响幼年燕八哥学习歌曲的偶然性，歌曲偏好和社交技能。总之，这项工作将建立一个新的范式，研究影响社会性的大脑机制，反过来，塑造大脑回路的社会特征。它将提供一个综合调查的机制基础和社会行为的进化功能。

In many species, humans included, the social environment influences physiology, behavior, and even evolution. The study of the mechanistic basis of social behaviour in the natural sciences, however, lacks a tractable experimental model system that captures the full range of neural, physiological and behavioural processes that mediate the complex interplay among individuals. For the past decade my students and I have been studying and experimentally manipulating social behaviour in a gregarious songbird: the brown-headed cowbird. We are able to experimentally manipulate social contexts of groups of birds living in large outdoor aviaries and now we are also able to control individuals' social proclivities experimentally by conducting neural manipulations on individuals and then studying them as they live, interact, and breed in social groups. The work in this proposal uses this paradigm (manipulating individuals' social characteristics and testing them as they live in large groups) to examine how neural mechanisms create behavioural phenotypes, how those individual characteristics affect social networks, and, in turn, how social networks change individuals' behavioural phenotypes and even their brains. Female subjects with neural lesions will be introduced into large outdoor aviaries, where subjects can live and breed in complex social environments. The manipulated females will sometimes serve as subjects for experiments (for example, to test their mating patterns, their reproductive output, and the health and viability of their young) but sometimes they will serve as the social environment, creating the culture in which other individuals develop (for example, interacting with juvenile male and juvenile female cowbirds, and thus influencing the juveniles' learning contingencies for song, song preferences and social skills. Taken together, this work will establish a new paradigm for studying the brain mechanisms that influence sociality and conversely, the social features that shape brain circuits. It will provide an integrated investigation into the mechanistic basis and the evolutionary function of social behaviour.