Back

Social transmission of valence-linked new knowledge without firsthand experience in mice

Kim, R.; Bito, H.; Kitamura, T.

2023-08-28 animal behavior and cognition
10.1101/2023.08.27.555038 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Animals can acquire new knowledge by observing others contexts and behavior, a process called social learning, which is essential for animals to survive in nature. While the social transmission of food preference (STFP) was previously adopted as a social learning test, several studies pointed out that non-social parameters might influence its food preference. We re-evaluated critical steps in the STFP test and designed an improved social learning test, which we now refer to as social transmission of food finding (STFF). A significant advance in the STFF test is the demonstration that mice learned the odor-food relationship with either positive or negative valence from the demonstrator without prior experience in the observer. Furthermore, a circuit dissection experiment showed that hippocampal function was differentially involved during learning and recall for STFF. Thus, STFF constitutes a highly advantageous social learning model in which valence-linked new knowledge can be socially transmitted without firsthand experience.

Matching journals

The top 3 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.