Sex differences in the reward value of familiar mates in prairie voles

The rewarding properties of social interactions facilitate relationship formation and maintenance. Prairie voles are one of the few laboratory species that form selective relationships, manifested as "partner preferences" for familiar partners versus strangers. While both sexes exhibit strong partner preferences, this similarity in outward behavior likely results from sex-specific neurobiological mechanisms. We recently used operant conditioning to demonstrate that females work harder for access to a familiar versus unfamiliar conspecific of either sex, while males worked equally hard for access to any female, indicating a key sex difference in social motivation. As tests were performed with one social target at a time, males might have experienced a ceiling effect, and familiar females might be more relatively rewarding in a choice scenario. Here we performed a social choice operant task in which voles could repeatedly lever-press to gain temporary access to either the chamber containing their mate or one containing a novel opposite-sex vole. Females worked hardest to access their mate, while males pressed at similar rates for either female. Individual male behavior was heterogeneous, congruent with multiple mating strategies in the wild. Voles exhibited preferences for favorable over unfavorable environments in a non-social operant task, indicating that lack of social preference does not reflect lack of discrimination between chambers. Oxytocin receptor genotype at the intronic SNP NT213739 replicated a prior association with stranger-directed aggression within the test. These findings suggest that convergent preference behavior in male and female voles results from sex-divergent pathways, particularly in the realm of social motivation.