Differential neural activity patterns mediate learning across contexts in a social cichlid fish

Abstract

Learning and decision-making are greatly influenced by the social context surrounding individuals. When navigating a complex social world, individuals must quickly ascertain where to gain important resources and which group members are useful sources of such information. Such dynamic behavioral processes require neural mechanisms that are flexible across contexts. Here we examined how the social context influences the learning response during a visual cue discrimination task and the neural activity patterns that underlie acquisition of this novel information. Using the cichlid fish, Astatotilapia burtoni, we show that learning of the task is faster in social groups than in a non-social context. We quantified the expression of Fos, an immediate-early gene, across candidate brain regions known to play a role in social behavior and learning, such as the putative teleost homologues of the mammalian hippocampus, basolateral amygdala, and medial amygdala/BNST complex. We found that neural activity patterns differ between social and non-social contexts. Our results suggest that while the same brain regions may be involved in the learning of a discrimination task independent of social context, activity in each region encodes specific aspects of the task based on context.