Pinho, J.S., Cunliffe, V. orcid.org/0000-0001-7483-7610, Kareklas, K. et al. (2 more authors) (2023) Social and asocial learning in zebrafish are encoded by a shared brain network that is differentially modulated by local activation. Communications Biology, 6 (1). 633. ISSN 2399-3642
Abstract
Group living animals use social and asocial cues to predict the presence of reward or punishment in the environment through associative learning. The degree to which social and asocial learning share the same mechanisms is still a matter of debate. We have used a classical conditioning paradigm in zebrafish, in which a social (fish image) or an asocial (circle image) conditioned stimulus (CS) have been paired with an unconditioned stimulus (US=food), and we have used the expression of the immediate early gene c-fos to map the neural circuits associated with each learning type. Our results show that the learning performance is similar to social and asocial CSs. However, the brain regions activated in each learning type are distinct and a community analysis of brain network data reveals segregated functional submodules, which seem to be associated with different cognitive functions involved in the learning tasks. These results suggest that, despite localized differences in brain activity between social and asocial learning, they share a common learning module and social learning also recruits a specific social stimulus integration module. Therefore, our results support the occurrence of a common general-purpose learning module, that is differentially modulated by localized activation in social and asocial learning.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2023 The Authors. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | Behavioural ecology; Social behaviour |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > School of Biosciences (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 20 Jun 2023 08:05 |
Last Modified: | 20 Jun 2023 08:05 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Science and Business Media LLC |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1038/s42003-023-04999-5 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:200601 |