Being a part of a social structure is key for survival and reproduction. Living with conspecifics boosts evolutionary fitness, by providing essential information about the environment. To examine how socially passed olfactory information about the reward affects behavior of individuals we used Eco-HAB, an automated system for tracing voluntary behavior of group-housed mice living under semi-naturalistic conditions. We show that presence of a scent of a rewarded individual has profound effects on social behavior of mice and their ability to find the reward in both familiar and novel environments. As a result, socially-conveyed information has different effects on individual mice. Further, we show that disrupting neuronal plasticity in the prelimbic cortex with nanoparticles gradually releasing TIMP metallopeptidase inhibitor 1, disrupts animals social behavior and results in decreased ability to adapt to environmental changes. The experimental paradigm we developed can be further used to study neuronal mechanisms of social learning.
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