PRE2023-Regulation of social preferences by the lateral septum (SocialPref)-PID2022-141262NA-I00

How does cognition orchestrate innate behaviors? While the cognitive functions of the cortex have been extensively studied, we know much less about how cognition regulate innate motivated behaviors to fulfill physiological, safety and social needs. Selection of appropriate motivated behaviors depends on external stimuli and past experiences that helps to scale priorities. With its abundant inputs from neocortical and allocortical regions, the lateral septum (LS) is ideally positioned to integrate perception and experience signals in order to regulate the activity of hypothalamic and midbrain nuclei that control motivated behaviors. In addition, the lateral septum receives numerous subcortical modulatory inputs, which represent the animal internal states and also participate in this regulation. This proposal focuses on two synergistic LS circuits promoting social interactions with novel mice and suppressing social interactions with familiar mice respectively. We postulate that both circuits work in tandem to regulate the activity of the parvafox nucleus and support social novelty preference. We will test this hypothesis using circuit tracing, electrophysiological recordings on acute brain slices, chemogenetic and optogenetic in freely-moving mice.