Social learning about rewards: how information from others helps to adapt to changing environment

Abstract

Being a part of a social structure is key for survival and reproduction. Living with conspecifics boosts evolutionary fitness, by providing essential information about the environment. Nonetheless, studying neural mechanisms of social learning has not yet been established under laboratory conditions. To examine how socially passed information about the reward affects the behavior of individuals we used Eco-HAB, an automated system for tracing voluntary behavior of group-housed mice living under semi-naturalistic conditions. We show that a scent of a rewarded individual has profound effects on the conspecifics ability to find the reward in both familiar and novel environments. Importantly, the animals display clear and stable individual differences in social behavior. As a result, socially conveyed information has different effects on individual mice. Further, we show that disrupting neuronal plasticity in the prelimbic cortex with nanoparticles gradually releasing TIMP metallopeptidase inhibitor 1, disrupts animals social behavior and results in decreased ability to adapt to environmental changes. The experimental paradigm we developed can be further used to study neuronal mechanisms of social learning.