Meeting Abstract
How do an individual’s decision-making and behavioral tendencies change when their social environment is altered? Individual variation in cognitive performance can be predicted by more general consistent behaviors such as aggression, neophobia, and sociability. Yet we know little about how the social environment influences the neuromolecular processes underlying this relationship between behavior and cognition. Here we manipulate naturalistic communities of the cichlid fish Astatotilapia burtoni, a model system in social neuroscience, to quantify behavioral tendencies and cognition across socially dominant males, subordinate males, and females. We assess individuals’ cognitive performance and cognitive style (how they approach a cognitive task) in a spatial maze followed by a reversal, a novel object recognition task, and a social competence task. This test suite is repeated after an experimental perturbation that allows some subordinate males to ascend in social status. Throughout, we assay circulating glucocorticoid and androgen levels. We then use quantitative real-time PCR of the immediate-early genes egr-1 and c-fos to determine to which extent the neural activity patterns in core nodes of the vertebrate social decision-making network (SDMN) correlate with behavior, cognitive style and performance, and social competence. Finally, in the same SDMN nodes, we measure the activity of genes associated with stress reactivity, decision-making, and social behavior. Our results provide uniquely comprehensive insights into the cognitive, behavioral, and mechanistic underpinnings of decision-making in a complex and dynamic social community.
