Go, No-Go: A Sensitive Period For Developing Sex-Specific Visually-Guided Prey Pursuit-Predator Avoidance Trade-Off Strategies

In natural environments, animals face a trade-off between foraging and staying vigilant against predators, a conflict known to shape sensory processing and behavior through natural selection. Even within a species, this trade-off may be resolved differently depending on age, sex, or life history. To identify the neural mechanisms underlying visually-guided pursuit-avoidance trade-offs, we studied how mice responded to a sudden overhead threat while pursuing a moving, prey-like target near the ground. This paradigm let us quantify orienting decisions in adolescent and adult mice of both sexes. We found that adolescence is a key period when male and female mice begin to diverge in how they resolve this conflict. Manipulating the value of the pursued target during adolescence versus adulthood revealed that adolescence is also a sensitive period for shaping adult escape-to-shelter versus continue to approach target behavior. Notably, hunting experience gained specifically during adolescence caused males, but not females, to shift strategy: experienced adolescent males tended to uniquely shift towards a "no-go" (stay-near-Prey) strategy. All the other groups instead favored an active "go" strategy, repeatedly shifting between approaching target and running to shelter. All mice showed this oscillation between approaching target and escaping to a shelter to some degree, but hunting experience during adolescence most significantly shifted this balance between approach and escape for males.