Social and asocial learning in zebrafish are encoded by a shared brain network that is differentially modulated by local activation

Pinho, Júlia; Cunliffe, Vincent T.; Petri, Giovanni; Oliveira, Rui Filipe

doi:10.1101/2021.10.12.464038

Cited by 5 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 63 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In addition to specialized circuits, social stimuli broadly drove excitation across visual brain regions in the wasp. These finding provide new insight into the debate about the role of specialized or dedicated circuitry for social behavior, which has involved diverse techniques at different scales across species There is growing evidence of social stimuli activating broad circuits across animal systems (34,35,(54)(55)(56)(57)(58). In primates there is also evidence for face selectivity as early as V4 in the primate brain (59) and possibly earlier (60).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Neural correlates of individual facial recognition in a social wasp

Jernigan,

Freiwald,

Sheehan

2024

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Individual recognition is critical for social behavior across species. Whether recognition is mediated by circuits specialized for social information processing has been a matter of debate. Here we examine the neurobiological underpinning of individual visual facial recognition inPolistes fuscatuspaper wasps. Front-facing images of conspecific wasps broadly increase activity across many brain regions relative to other stimuli. Notably, we identify a localized subpopulation of neurons in the protocerebrum which show specialized selectivity for front-facing wasp images, which we termwasp cells. Thesewasp cellsencode information regarding the facial patterns, with ensemble activity correlating with facial identity.Wasp cellsare strikingly analogous to face cells in primates, indicating that specialized circuits are likely an adaptive feature of neural architecture to support visual recognition.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Neural correlates of individual facial recognition in a social wasp

Jernigan,

Freiwald,

Sheehan

2024

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For example, zebrafish ( Danio rerio ) can learn to associate social and asocial stimuli with a food reward equally effectively, however the gene of interest, c‐fos , was expressed in different brain regions when presented with social stimuli compared to an asocial stimulus. Learning from social and asocial cues involved the same learning module, but with differences in localised activation (Pinho et al ., 2021). Assembling such a data set may be too tall an order for a survey of existing literature, although partial data sets could perhaps be assembled for well‐studied fish or bird clades.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social learning in non‐grouping animals

Webster

2023

Biological Reviews

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Social learning is widespread in the animal kingdom and is involved in behaviours from navigation and predator avoidance to mate choice and foraging. While social learning has been extensively studied in group-living species, this article presents a literature review demonstrating that social learning is also seen in a range of non-grouping animals, including arthropods, fishes and tetrapod groups, and in a variety of behavioural contexts. We should not be surprised by this pattern, since non-grouping animals are not necessarily non-social, and stand to benefit from attending to and responding to social information in the same ways that group-living species do. The article goes on to ask what non-grouping species can tell us about the evolution and development of social learning. First, while social learning may be based on the same cognitive processes as other kinds of learning, albeit with social stimuli, sensory organs and brain regions associated with detection and motivation to respond to social information may be under selection. Non-grouping species may provide useful comparison taxa in phylogenetic analyses investigating if and how the social environment drives selection on these input channels. Second, non-grouping species may be ideal candidates for exploring how ontogenetic experience of social cues shapes the development of social learning, allowing researchers to avoid some of the negative welfare implications associated with raising group-living animals under restricted social conditions. Finally, while non-grouping species may be capable of learning socially under experimental conditions, there is a need to consider how non-grouping restricts access to learning opportunities under natural conditions and whether this places a functional constraint on what non-grouping animals actually learn socially in the wild.

show abstract

“…More generally, social learning through observation (i.e. without direct reward or punishment) has been found to elicit transcriptomic responses, such that watching aggressive confrontations between conspecifics has been shown to correlate with expression of genes associated with neuronal plasticity and memory formation in ‘eavesdropping’ zebrafish Danio rerio [68] and social learning of fear responses elicits c-fos expression in distinct neural circuits to individual learning in the same species [69]. These studies differ from the current work in that the focus is not on the learnt information itself, but they illustrate that process of learning from another animal appears to be detectable in the transcriptome.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Transcriptomic responses to location learning by honeybee dancers are partly mirrored in the brains of dance-followers

Manfredini,

Wurm,

Sumner

et al. 2023

Proc. R. Soc. B.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The waggle dances of honeybees are a strikingly complex form of animal communication that underlie the collective foraging behaviour of colonies. The mechanisms by which bees assess the locations of forage sites that they have visited for representation on the dancefloor are now well-understood, but few studies have considered the remarkable backward translation of such information into flight vectors by dance-followers. Here, we explore whether the gene expression patterns that are induced through individual learning about foraging locations are mirrored when bees learn about those same locations from their nest-mates. We first confirmed that the mushroom bodies of honeybee dancers show a specific transcriptomic response to learning about distance, and then showed that approximately 5% of those genes were also differentially expressed by bees that follow dances for the same foraging sites, but had never visited them. A subset of these genes were also differentially expressed when we manipulated distance perception through an optic flow paradigm, and responses to learning about target direction were also in part mirrored in the brains of dance followers. Our findings show a molecular footprint of the transfer of learnt information from one animal to another through this extraordinary communication system, highlighting the dynamic role of the genome in mediating even very short-term behavioural changes.

show abstract

Social and asocial learning in zebrafish are encoded by a shared brain network that is differentially modulated by local activation

Cited by 5 publications

References 63 publications

Neural correlates of individual facial recognition in a social wasp

Neural correlates of individual facial recognition in a social wasp

Social learning in non‐grouping animals

Transcriptomic responses to location learning by honeybee dancers are partly mirrored in the brains of dance-followers

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About