Asymmetric Social Representations in the Prefrontal Cortex for Cooperative Behavior.

ABSTRACT: Cooperation is a hallmark of social species, enabling individuals to achieve goals that are unattainable alone. Across species, cooperative behaviors are often organized by distinct social roles such as leaders and followers, yet the neural mechanisms supporting such role-based coordination remain elusive. Here we introduce a new paradigm for studying cooperation in mice, where pairs of animals engage in a joint spatial foraging task that naturally gives rise to stable leader-follower roles predictive of learning speed. Disruption of medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) activity, particularly in followers, impairs cooperation and induces reciprocal shifts in how animals weigh self- and partner-related cues for decision-making. Calcium imaging reveals that mPFC encodes both leadership dynamics a

SUBMITTER: Cheng Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12407837 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature