Citation

Cruz A, Heinemans M, Márquez C, Moita MA. Curr. Biol. 2020; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Affiliation

Behavioral Neuroscience Lab, Champalimaud Research, Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, 1400-038 Lisbon, Portugal. Electronic address: marta.moita@neuro.fchampalimaud.org.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.cub.2020.01.025

PMID

32032509

Abstract

Social cues of threat are widely reported [1-3], whether actively produced to trigger responses in others such as alarm calls or by-products of an encounter with a predator, like the defensive behaviors themselves such as escape flights [4-14]. Although the recognition of social alarm cues is often innate [15-17], in some instances it requires experience to trigger defensive responses [4, 7]. One mechanism proposed for how learning from self-experience contributes to social behavior is that of auto-conditioning, whereby subjects learn to associate their own behaviors with relevant trigger events. Through this process, the same behaviors, now displayed by others, gain meaning [18, 19] (but see [20]). Although it has been shown that only animals with prior experience with shock display observational freezing [21-25], suggesting that auto-conditioning could mediate this process, evidence for this hypothesis was lacking. Previously we found that, when a rat freezes, the silence that results from immobility triggers observational freezing in its cage-mate, provided the cage-mate had experienced shocks before [24]. Therefore, in our study, auto-conditioning would correspond to rats learning to associate shock with their own response to it-freezing. Using a combination of behavioral and optogenetic manipulations, here, we show that freezing becomes an alarm cue by a direct association with shock. Our work shows that auto-conditioning can indeed modulate social interactions, expanding the repertoire of cues mediating social information exchange, providing a framework to study how the neural circuits involved in the self-experience of defensive behaviors overlap with the ones involved in socially triggered defensive behaviors.

Copyright © 2020. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Language: en

Keywords

2MT; auto-conditioning; fear; looming stimulus; rodents; social behavior; vlPAG