Oxytocin Manipulation Alters Neural Activity in Response to Social Stimuli in Eusocial Naked Mole-Rats
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The social decision-making network is a conserved neural circuit that modulates a range of social behaviors via context-specific patterns of activation that may be controlled in part by oxytocinergic signalling. We have previously characterized oxytocin’s influence on prosociality in the naked mole-rat, a eusocial mammalian species, and its altered neural distribution between animals of differing social status. Here, we asked two questions: 1) do patterns of activation in the social decision-making network vary by social context and 2) is functional connectivity of the social decision-making network altered by oxytocin manipulation? Adult subordinate naked mole-rats were exposed to one of three types of stimuli (three behavioral paradigms: familiar adult conspecific, unfamiliar adult conspecific, or familiar pups) while manipulating oxytocin (three manipulations: saline, oxytocin, or oxytocin antagonist). Immediate early gene c-Fos activity was quantified using immunohistochemistry across social decision-making network regions. Network analyses indicated that the social decision-making network is conserved in naked mole-rats and functions in a context-dependent manner. Specific brain regions were recruited with each behavioral paradigm suggesting a role for the nucleus accumbens in social valence and sociosexual interaction, the prefrontal cortex in assessing/establishing social dominance, and the hippocampus in pup recognition. Furthermore, while oxytocin manipulation was generally disruptive to coordinated neural activity, the specific effects were context-dependent supporting the hypothesis that oxytocinergic signalling promotes context appropriate social behaviors by modulating co-ordinated activity of the social decision-making network. ACC=Anterior cingulate cortex, AH=Anterior hypothalamus, AntPVN=Anterior paraventricular nucleus, AON=Anterior olfactory nucleus, BLA=Basolateral amygdala, BNST=Bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, CeA=Central amygdala, CG=Cingulate cortex, CA1=Cornu ammonis 1, CA2=Cornu ammonis 2, CA3=Cornu ammonis 3, Caudate=Caudate putamen, dDG=dorsal dentate gyrus, IL=Infralimbic cortex, LS=Lateral septum, MeA=Medial amygdala, MOB=Main olfactory bulb, MS=Medial septum, NAcc=Nucleus accumbens, PG=periaqueductal grey, PIC=Piriform cortex, PO=Pre-optic area, PostPVN=Posterior paraventricular nucleus, PrL=Pre-limbic cortex, SON=Supraoptic nucleus, Tu=Olfactory tubercle, vDG=Ventral dentate gyrus, VMH=Ventromedial hypothalamus, VP=Ventral pallidum, VTA=Ventral tegmental area
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".