Oxytocin neurons enable social transmission of maternal behaviour.

Maternal care, including by non-biological parents, is important for offspring survival1-8. Oxytocin1,2,9-15, which is released by the hypothalamic paraventricular nucleus (PVN), is a critical maternal hormone. In mice, oxytocin enables neuroplasticity in the auditory cortex for maternal recognition of pup distress15. However, it is unclear how initial parental experience promotes hypothalamic signalling and cortical plasticity for reliable maternal care. Here we continuously monitored the behaviour of female virgin mice co-housed with an experienced mother and litter. This documentary approach was synchronized with neural recordings from the virgin PVN, including oxytocin neurons. These cells were activated as virgins were enlisted in maternal care by experienced mothers, who shepherded virgins into the nest and demonstrated pup retrieval. Virgins visually observed maternal retrieval, which activated PVN oxytocin neurons and promoted alloparenting. Thus rodents can acquire maternal behaviour by social transmission, providing a mechanism for adapting the brains of adult caregivers to infant needs via endogenous oxytocin.

Interactive neurorobotics: Behavioral and neural dynamics of agent interactions.

Interactive neurorobotics is a subfield which characterizes brain responses evoked during interaction with a robot, and their relationship with the behavioral responses. Gathering rich neural and behavioral data from humans or animals responding to agents can act as a scaffold for the design process of future social robots. This research seeks to study how organisms respond to artificial agents in contrast to biological or inanimate ones. This experiment uses the novel affordances of the robotic platforms to investigate complex dynamics during minimally structured interactions that would be difficult to capture with classical experimental setups. We then propose a general framework for such experiments that emphasizes naturalistic interactions combined with multimodal observations and complementary analysis pipelines that are necessary to render a holistic picture of the data for the purpose of informing robotic design principles. Finally, we demonstrate this approach with an exemplar rat-robot social interaction task which included simultaneous multi-agent tracking and neural recordings.