Meeting Abstract
Animals perform visual displays to communicate information about potential competitors, mates, predators, and prey. Behavioral responses to these complex displays have evolved as a result of the mechanisms by which visual information is processed in the brain. Here, we seek to understand how information processing differs among Anolis carolinensis (green anole lizards) exposed to social or non-social visual information by manipulating visual cues and measuring subsequent changes in neural activity within the visual and social nuclei of the brain. We conducted behavioral trials in which a male lizard was placed in a visually neutral arena, presented with visual information from a live anole or from carefully constructed video playback, and their behavioral responses were recorded. Each lizard (n = 40) was randomly assigned to one of four treatments – social control (two live males interacting with each other), non-social control (focal lizard shown video of a stationary perch), social condition (focal lizard shown video of a lizard displaying on a perch), or non-social condition (focal lizard shown video of a lizard displaying on a perch, but with the pixels scrambled to remove social context). Our behavioral results showed that lizards in the social treatments were more attentive to the visual information than lizards in the nonsocial treatments. Immediately after each trial, lizard brains were flash-frozen in isopentane. We are now using immunocytochemistry to measure neural activity in the visual and social brain regions by quantifying expression levels of the immediate early gene c-fos. From this study, we hope to gain a greater understanding of how lizards process visual and social information and the degree to which brain regions differentially respond to visual displays.
