Date: Wednesday, September 11, 2024
Location: 46-3002 (Singleton Auditorium)

Speaker: Nancy Padilla-Coreano, Ph.D.

Affiliation: Assistant Professor, Department of Neuroscience, University of Florida

Host: Dr. Steve Flavell

Talk title: Neural dynamics of social competence 

Abstract: Most social species, from insects to humans, organize into social dominance hierarchies to decrease aggression, conserve energy, and maximize survival for the group. Despite how critical social and dominance behaviors are for successful interactions with other group members, it is unclear how the brain encodes social rank. The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) has been implicated in social dominance expression in rodents, and in social rank learning in humans. In this talk we uncover how the mPFC encodes social competition at the cell, circuit and network levels in mice.