Cognition, Behavior, and Memory
Author: Luciana Delfina Levinsonas | Email: lucianalevinsonas@gmail.com
Luciana Delfina Levinsonas1°2°, Paula Funaro1°2°, Verónica de la Fuente1°2°
1° Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina
2° Instituto de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Neurociencias (IFIBYNE-UBA-CONICET), Argentina
Social recognition memory (SRM) is essential for maintaining the stability of social groups, as it allows individuals to identify and remember conspecifics across time. Despite the importance of SRM, the neural circuits involved remain poorly understood. In rodents, SRM is commonly studied using the social recognition task (SRT), where an experimental subject initially explores an unfamiliar conspecific and is later presented with the familiar individual alongside a novel one. Social novelty preference, the tendency to favor interactions with novel conspecifics, has long been used as a proxy for assessing social memory. In our lab, we recently established the SRT paradigm to begin investigating the neural basis of SRM. Using cFOS immunohistochemistry, we observed an increase in cFOS-positive cells in the dentate gyrus of the dorsal hippocampus, but not in the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus, in mice that underwent the SRT, compared to naive mice or mice that underwent an object recognition task. These findings suggest a potential role for the dorsal hippocampus in SRM. Here, we discuss future experiments aimed at further elucidating the neural circuits involved in SRM. Understanding the neural circuits underlying social recognition is crucial, as disruptions in these processes are linked to various psychiatric, neurodevelopmental, and neurodegenerative disorders.