Talk Title: Hormone-mediated multi-day reorganization of cortical dynamics during female social choice

Abstract: Sex-steroid hormones powerfully influence internal states, mood, and social drive. In many species, including mice, females exhibit increased sexual receptivity during the peri-ovulatory phase following an estrogen surge. However, we lack understanding of how these hormones alter neural computations to regulate social behaviors, particularly their effects on neural dynamics in key regions for top-down control of social choice, such as the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). One potential, but unexplored role of the estrogen surge is to enable persistent neural states to facilitate costly behaviors during the reproductive window. To test this, here we manipulate estrogen levels in females across a multi-day social choice paradigm. We quantify moment-to-moment behavioral changes based on features from multi-animal pose tracking using SLEAP, alongside chronic Neuropixels recordings from all mPFC subdivisions longitudinally across long-term hormone shifts. Female subjects reversibly change their social preference from females to males following estrogenic surge. Interestingly, higher estrogen levels also lead to more persistent behaviors. Using a hidden Markov model to segment the mPFC population activity in an unsupervised manner reveals neural state sequences that govern the cortical dynamics and and track the behavioral states with increased accuracy and persistence in high-estrogenic states. Dimensionality reduction and latent-space analyses suggest distinct ensembles in mPFC encoding male, female, and self-directed behaviors, and the ability to decode these states is significantly improved in the high estrogen states. Tracking day-to-day single-unit identity reveals that the estrogen surge reduces representational drift in social tuning. Crucially, we see increased functional coupling within the mPFC network, particularly among similarly tuned ensembles. Together, our work demonstrates that sex steroid hormones reshape female social preference and choice persistence by remodeling cortical function across multiple levels, from underlying functional connectivity to neural coding and emergent network dynamics.

Bio: Meenakshi Asokan is a postdoctoral fellow in Annegret Falkner’s lab at Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology, with a Neurobiology concentration from Harvard University in 2022 and her B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering, with a minor in Biomedical Engineering, from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 2015.

Followed by a reception with food and drink in 3^rd floor atrium