The 48th Annual Meeting of the Japan Neuroscience Society

chairperson: Yuichiro Imai (Evident Corporation)

Co-sponsored by Evident Corporation

In everyday life, we effortlessly navigate social interactions—sometimes cooperating with others, sometimes competing—and even these seemingly simple actions depend on highly intricate brain functions. For example, the decision to “keep away from someone I dislike” requires (i) recognizing the individual from sensory cues, (ii) retrieving a social memory of that person stored in the hippocampus, (iii) activating affective circuits that assign negative valence, and (iv) routing this signal to neural pathways that drive avoidance behavior. In this talk, I will focus on ventral hippocampal CA1 neurons that store social memories and show how these neurons represent “others” using a combination of coding schemes. I will then discuss how information encoded in these hippocampal ensembles is relayed to downstream circuits to generate a wide range of social behaviors. The presentation will highlight our recent findings that clarify the cellular and circuit mechanisms underlying these processes.
References;
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Chung et al., Nature Communications, 15:4531 (2024)
Huang & Chung et al., Nature Communications, 14:3458 (2023)
Tao et al., Molecular Psychiatry, 27:2095 (2022)
Okuyama et al., Science, 353:1536 (2016)
Okuyama et al., Science, 343:91 (2014)