Regester, Daniel; (2024) Encoding of Social Sensory Information in the Medial Amygdala. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Appropriate social behaviours are vital for the propagation of species. To achieve this animals must correctly identify the age and sex of a conspecific, and execute the appropriate behaviour of mating, aggression or parenting toward that stimulus, and do so flexibly based in the case of past-experience. The medial amygdala (MeA) plays a critical role in processing social-specific sensory cues and is known to respond to male, female and pups in rodents. However, the precise sensory stimuli and/or behavioural variables that drive these responses are not well understood. In this thesis, I investigate how different social-specific sensory cues activate and are integrated by MeA neurons at the single-neuron and population levels in male mice. During naturalistic social interactions I show that MeA neurons display complex and heterogeneous responses that suggest multisensory and/or behavioural cues drive these neurons. I then investigate the responses of MeA neurons in a controlled head-fixed paradigm. At the level of single neurons I show that there is excitation and inhibition of MeA neurons in response to individual non-volatile pheromones, mixtures of non-volatile pheromones, mixtures of volatile odours and pheromones and tactile stimuli. In addition, I show that MeA neurons are more specifically tuned to sensory cues in fathers than in virgins. I show that the MeA robustly encodes social sensory stimuli at the population level, and does so more accurately and with shorter latency in fathers vs virgins. Finally, I also describe a biphasic neural dynamic of the MeA population in response to social stimuli. Together, my results suggest that the MeA population robustly encodes the identity of social stimuli likely as a result of multisensory responses in MeA neurons. Furthermore, I add insight into how experience shapes the way the MeA encodes social sensory stimuli.

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