Recognizing individual conspecifics and accumulating individual-specific information through social interaction constitute a fundamental ability to survive as a member of a society. Although individual recognition has been reported in many different species including rodents, neural underpinnings of individual recognition have not been clear. My lab developed a novel individual discrimination paradigm that requires subject mice to distinguish between two familiar male siblings presented in random order and associate each with either reward or no reward.
This paradigm utilizes head-restrained mice to repetitively engage in simplified and stereotyped face-to-face interactions and allows us to quantitatively measure behavioral performance and to precisely correlate behaviors with neuronal activities. Using in vivo two-photon calcium imaging we found that activities of dorsal CA1 neurons provide information for individual conspecifics.
Social recognition, Hippocampus, Place cell, Episodic Memory