SOCIAL CODE

Social interactions are essential for behaviors such as cooperation, group coordination, mating, and protection. These behaviors rely on the ability to form social memories—remembering familiar conspecifics—a process that is disrupted in autism spectrum disorders. While mice can form such memories, and optogenetic studies have identified excitatory neuron assemblies in selected forebrain areas as critical sites for social memory, the precise neural representations of different types of social interactions (e.g., novel vs. familiar partners) and their potential variation over time remain poorly understood, especially in the cortex, the main site of long-term memory storage and retrieval. Furthermore, whether these representations are altered in autism remains an open question.
This project aims to address these gaps by using state-of-the-art miniature microscopes for calcium imaging to record the activity of large excitatory neuron ensembles in two cortical areas of awake mice: the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the somatosensory cortex. The mPFC serves as a positive control due to its established role in social cognition, while the somatosensory cortex is included to investigate its potential involvement in social information processing. Neural representations of social interactions will be examined at both the single-cell and population levels in wild-type and Neurod2 knockout (KO) mice, a recently identified model of social amnesia.
By uncovering the neural code underlying social interaction and memory, this study aims to provide fundamental insights into the cortical processing of social information and reveal how these mechanisms are disrupted in a neurodevelopmental disorder model.