Robert Froemke
Ph.D.
NYU School of Medicine
Animals can work together in groups to achieve specific aims with higher success rates than if acting alone. For communally-living and consociating species such as humans and rodents, group dynamics impact essentially all aspects of life. These collective behaviors enable animals to overcome challenges to survival, and critically depend on social relations between the individuals who work together, to collect resources such as food and water, build homes and habitats such as nests and burrows, and communally raise offspring. Social behaviors including child rearing, pair bonding, and other forms of inter-personal relationships are critical for the success of mammalian social groups, and are also fundamental for human health and happiness. However, little is known about the neural computations underlying these important behaviors, especially in complex naturalistic environments. Despite the wealth of information about the neural circuits important for social behavior, the vast majority of studies of neural activity have been performed under laboratory conditions, and it is unclear how dyadic and more complex group interactions assessed in the lab relate to spontaneous behaviors animals perform in larger environments or outdoors.
In this Brain Research Foundation (BRF) proposal, the Froemke and Lin labs at NYU will, for the first time, work together to study social behaviors of mouse colonies with neural recordings in complex naturalistic environments simulating outdoor conditions. The Froemke lab invented a new behavioral system to perform 24/7 monitoring of mouse family life and social interactions in home cages, leading to new discoveries of mouse behavior. The Lin lab has performed fundamental studies of aggression, and now here we will collaborate to synthesize our approaches for studies of mouse family life. We have a new vivarium with naturalistic burrows and large (10’x10′) enclosures with light/dark cycles, plants, and limited resource availability for nest-building and foraging we can control. These burrows will contain multiple infrared cameras and ultrasonic microphones for recording behavior, even underground, to provide high-resolution views of parenting in naturalistic conditions, complemented by wireless neural recordings from oxytocin neurons for social behavior and parental care. In Aim 1 we will study how a colony of mice raise offspring, and in Aim 2 we will study how two colonies sharing the same territory compete for resources such as food and water. This project is otherwise unfunded. With BRF support, we plan to collect pilot data to compete for a long-term NIH U/P grant at the end of the BRF project period.
