Where's my mom? Resilient maternal preference in post-weaning male and female mice within a multi-chamber social behavior task
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the earliest and most important social bonds for many mammals is the bond formed with their mother. Mothers often provide essential benefits for offspring development and survival. Growing evidence suggests that this social bond is retained even when animals gain independence, such as during the juvenile period immediately following weaning. Here, we investigated whether or not juvenile mice (postnatal day [P]26) retain the ability to recognize and prefer their mothers post-weaning. We further investigated the strength of this bond using an acute immune activator. On P26, male and female C57BL/6J mice were intraperitoneally injected with the endotoxin lipopolysaccharide (LPS) or saline control (0.5 mg/kg). Four hours later, mice were subject to a five-chamber social preference task (the AGORA) containing their biological mother, a sex- and age-matched novel mouse, a sex- and age-matched sibling, a novel object, and an empty chamber. Our findings reveal that juvenile mice exhibit a strong maternal preference, which was significantly greater than chance and higher compared to any other social or non-social stimuli. While LPS exposure reduced the time spent investigating all stimuli, juvenile maternal preference was not significantly altered by LPS exposure. These effects were especially pronounced in females, while subtle shifts towards novel exploration began to emerge in males by P26. The novel multi-chamber task employed in the present study offered a more nuanced understanding of how social bonds evolve and vary across sex. The current findings suggest that juvenile mice have a robust social preference for their mother that is resilient to early-life immune activation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".