Neural correlates of ingroup bias for prosociality in rats | eLife

Prosocial behavior, in particular helping others in need, occurs preferentially in response to distress of one’s own group members. In order to explore the neural mechanisms promoting mammalian helping behavior, a discovery-based approach was used here to identify brain-wide activity correlated with helping behavior in rats. Demonstrating social selectivity, rats helped others of their strain (‘ingroup’), but not rats of an unfamiliar strain (‘outgroup’), by releasing them from a restrainer. Analysis of brain-wide neural activity via quantification of the early-immediate gene c-Fos identified a shared network, including frontal and insular cortices, that was active in the helping test irrespective of group membership. In contrast, the striatum was selectively active for ingroup members, and activity in the nucleus accumbens, a central network hub, correlated with helping. In vivo calcium imaging showed accumbens activity when rats approached a trapped ingroup member, and retrograde tra

Neural correlates of ingroup bias for prosociality in rats | eLife Version of Record July 13, 2021 Download Cite Share Comment Open annotations (there are currently 0 annotations on this page). 8,406 views 1,042 downloads 61 citations Altmetric provides a collated score for online attention across various platforms and media. See more details Discussed in Share this article Doi Copy to clipboard Cite this article Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal Jocelyn M Breton Huanjie Sheng Kimberly LP Long Stella Chen Aline Halliday Justin W Kenney Anne L Wheeler Paul Frankland Carrie Shilyansky Karl Deisseroth Dacher

related reading

• A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviournature.com
• Volitional control of individual neurons in the human brainpmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
• Engram neurons: Encoding, consolidation, retrieval, and forgetting of memorynature.com
• Neuroscience of human social instincts: a sketchzenodo.org
• The Tenacious Brain: How the Anterior Mid-Cingulate Contributes to Achieving Goalspmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
• Evidence that recurrent circuits are critical to the ventral stream’s execution of core object recognition behaviornature.com
• Complementary task representations in hippocampus and prefrontal cortex for generalizing the structure of problemsnature.com
• Shared mechanisms underlie the control of working memory and attentionnature.com
• Identifying dysfunctional cell types and circuits in animal models for psychiatric disorders with calcium imagingnature.com
• Breathing coordinates cortico-hippocampal dynamics in mice during offline statesnature.com
• Dynamic and selective engrams emerge with memory consolidationnature.com
• Huddling by rat pups: ontogeny of individual and group behavior - PubMedpubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov