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Dynamics of social representation in the mouse prefrontal cortex
- Publication Year :
- 2018
- Publisher :
- Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 2018.
-
Abstract
- The prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays an important role in regulating social functions in mammals, and impairments in this region have been linked with social dysfunction in psychiatric disorders. Yet little is known of how the PFC encodes social information and of how social representations may be altered in such disorders. Here, we show that neurons in the medial PFC (mPFC) of freely behaving mice preferentially respond to socially-relevant sensory cues. Population activity patterns in the mPFC differed considerably between social and nonsocial stimuli and underwent experience-dependent refinement. In Cntnap2 knockout mice, a genetic model of autism, both the categorization of sensory stimuli and the refinement of social representations were impaired. Noise levels in spontaneous population activity were higher in Cntnap2 mice, and correlated strongly with the degree to which social representations were disrupted. Our findings elucidate the encoding of social sensory cues in the mPFC, and provide an important link between altered prefrontal dynamics and autism-associated social dysfunction.
- Subjects :
- 0303 health sciences
CNTNAP2
education.field_of_study
Population
Sensory system
medicine.disease
03 medical and health sciences
0302 clinical medicine
nervous system
Social representation
Genetic model
medicine
Autism
Prefrontal cortex
Psychology
education
Sensory cue
Neuroscience
030217 neurology & neurosurgery
030304 developmental biology
Subjects
Details
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....2148618e7de7e8395920a5f5b6033df3