Social Dominance and familiarity modulate prosocial decision-making in rats

Abstract

Prosocial behaviors i.e., actions that benefit others are pervasive in the animal kingdom, being essential for social bonding and cooperation. Several factors have been proposed to modulate prosocial behaviors, such as the familiarity of the partner and the social status of the interacting individuals. However, little is know about the behavioral and brain mechanisms that promote these interesting modulations. To target these questions, we investigate the effects of social context on prosocial behavior in rats, an animal model with rich social interactions and amenable of neural circuits manipulation. We previously showed that rats display prosocial choices in the absence of self-benefit (Marquez et al., 2015). Here we ask whether this kind decision-making is modulated by the familiarity and the social status of the interacting animals. In order to gain insights into the behavioral mechanisms underlying prosocial choices, we performed fine-grained quantification of social interactions, with subsecond resolution, using a custom-made automated tracking system for animals body parts detection.