Neural Coding of Social Information

A quantitative understanding of social behavior and the circuits implicated in processing these events is crucial for improving the diagnosis and treatment of neurological disorders in which social and sensory communications are impaired. Mice are a great model system for studying social interactions due to the power of manipulating their genome to produce abnormal behavioral phenotypes. In addition, mice are naturally social creatures. They form diverse societies that are affected by group dynamics such as investigative and reproductive behaviors. These behaviors occur concurrently with the emission of ultrasonic vocalizations. Playback of these sounds elicits responses in neural structures involved in processing social information. However, the neural circuitry underlying ultrasonic vocalizations and the function of these vocalizations during social behavior is unclear.

My group is focused on revealing the functions of ultrasonic vocalizations in social behavior and delineating the neural circuits that process social information. Our goal is to identify vocal signatures of individual mice during specific social contexts, as well as to discover the neural representations of these signatures. By developing a system that enables us to localize and assign vocalizations to individual animals when multiple mice are present, our group can examine the relationship between vocal and social interactions. Coupling this system with neurophysiology approaches in freely moving animals uniquely positions our group to significantly advance our understanding of the interplay between vocalizations, neural coding, and social interactions in both wild type and mouse models of autism.