Meeting Abstract
P3.12 Monday, Jan. 6 15:30 The Effects of Social Status on Activity Patterns of the Social Decision-Making Network MAGUIRE, SM*; YU, S; HOFMANN, HA; UT Austin, Austin TX smmaguire@gmail.com
Social decision making requires animals to evaluate external cues from a stimulus in relation to internal information such as their past experience, current condition or hormonal state. In vertebrates, social decision making is linked to the pattern of activity across 12 conserved brain areas called the Social Decision-Making (SDM) network. Behavioral decisions vary across physiological contexts. For example, an animal may tend to approach an intruder during the breeding season but may avoid that same stimulus in the non-breeding season. This variation in response may be influenced by changes in the patterns of activity across the SDM network that covary with behavioral phenotype. Astatotilapia burtoni, an African cichlid fish, is an ideal model to study the mechanisms underlying social decision-making. A. burtoni males display several distinct phenotypes: dominant, subordinate, and intermediate. These phenotypes are associated with differences in behavior, hormone levels and brain gene expression patterns. We quantified the behavior of males in naturalistic communities and used discriminant functions to create a dominance index that captures the range of subordinate to dominant phenotypes. We then measured metabolic activity in the SDM network using histochemistry of cytochrome oxidase, an enzyme critical for energy metabolism whose activity correlates with neuronal activity. We used linear models to identify the brain areas that are correlated to social status and behavioral patterns. Furthermore, we constructed covariance networks across the nodes of the SDM network and used the quadratic assignment procedure to assess how these patterns relate to social status. Future studies will determine how these status-dependent activity patterns influence neural activity and behavior induced by social stimuli.
