Acquiring and exploiting memories of rewarding experiences is critical for survival. The spatial environment in which a rewarding stimulus is encountered regulates memory retrieval. The ventral hippocampus (vH) has been implicated in contextual memories involving rewarding stimuli such as food, social cues or drugs. Yet, the neuronal representations and circuits underlying contextual memories of socially rewarding stimuli are poorly understood. Here, using in vivo electrophysiological recordings, in vivo one-photon calcium imaging, and optogenetics during a social reward contextual conditioning paradigm in male mice, we show that vH neurons discriminate between contexts with neutral or acquired social reward value. The formation of context-discriminating vH neurons following learning was contingent upon the presence of unconditioned stimuli. Moreover, vH neurons showed distinct contextual representations during the retrieval of social reward compared to fear contextual memories. Finally, optogenetic inhibition of locus coeruleus (LC) projections in the vH selectively disrupted social reward contextual memory by impairing vH contextual representations. Collectively, our findings reveal that the vH integrates contextual and social reward information, with memory encoding of these representations supported by input from the LC.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-53866-2 | DOI Listing |
PLoS One
January 2025
Department of Integrative Biology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America.
It has been proposed that social groups are maintained both by reward resulting from positive social interactions and by the reduction of a negative state that would otherwise be caused by social separation. European starlings, Sturnus vulgaris, develop strong conditioned place preferences for places associated with the production of song in flocks outside the breeding season (gregarious song) and singers are motivated to rejoin the flock following removal. This indicates that the act of singing in flocks is associated with a positive affective state and raises the possibility that reward induced by song in flocks may play a role in flock maintenance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by restricted and repetitive behaviors and social differences, both of which may manifest, in part, from underlying differences in corticostriatal circuits and reinforcement learning. Here, we investigated reinforcement learning in mice with mutations in either or , both high-confidence ASD risk genes associated with major syndromic forms of ASD. Using an odor-based two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) task, we tested adolescent mice of both sexes and found male and heterozygote (Het) mice showed enhanced learning performance compared to their wild type (WT) siblings.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Psychol
January 2025
Health Service Executive, Portlaoise, Ireland.
Association football (soccer) is the world's most popular sport. Transculturally, fans invest significant resources following their teams, suggesting underlying psychological universals with evolutionary origins. Although evolutionary science can help illuminate the ultimate causes of human behaviour, there have been limited modern evolutionary perspectives on football fandom.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCommun Psychol
January 2025
Department of Psychology, Social and Economic Psychology, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
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View Article and Find Full Text PDFTransl Psychiatry
January 2025
Division of Psychology, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden.
Background: Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is associated with deficits in social cognition and behavior, but why these deficits are acquired is unknown. We hypothesized that a reduced association between actions and outcomes for others, i.e.
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