Abstract:
Social experiences and experience-dependent hormones can have lasting changes on behavior and affective state. We combine quantitative tools for behavioral analysis with a variety of techniques for large-scale neural recording across multiple scales to understand how the brain’s “social decision-making network” transforms social motivation into action and how steroid hormones constrain computation in these circuits. We use methods for longitudinal “dense sampling” to map how social experiences and associated hormonal changes update behavioral policy and facilitate persistent social states.