A behavioral roadmap for the development of agency in the rodent

Abstract

Behavioral interactions within the nuclear family play a pivotal role in the emergence of agency: the capacity to regulate physiological, psychological and social needs. While behaviors may develop over days or weeks in line with nervous system maturation, individual behaviors can occur on sub-second time scales making it challenging to track development in lab studies with brief observation periods, or in field studies with limited temporal precision and animal identification. Here we study development in families of gerbils, a highly social rodent, collecting tens of millions of behavior time points and implementing machine learning methods to track individual subjects. We provided maturing gerbils with a large, undisturbed environment between postnatal day 15 and the age at which they would typically disperse from the family unit (day 30). We identified complex and distinct developmental trajectories for food and water acquisition, solitary exploration, and social behaviors, some of which displayed sex differences and diurnal patterns. Our work supports the emergence of well-delineated autonomous and social behavior phenotypes that correlate with specific periods and loci of neural maturation.