"Animals have numerous behaviors, which are controlled or modulated by the activities of neural circuits. Mechanistic understanding of animal behavior at the circuitry level is one of the ultimate challenges of Systems Neuroscience. By combinatory use of techniques including multichannel recording, transgene, optogenetic / chemogenetic manipulation, single cell electrophysiology and behavioral studies, we are investigating the relationship between the activities of neuronal ensemble and the behaviors of. We established novel paradigms of social behaviors that are suitable for several model animals, such as Mouse /Rat /Tree Shrew/Marmoset. The research in our lab is aimed to understand the neural mechanism underlying certain mammalian social behaviors at the level of neural circuit, but also the relationship between the developments of neural networks and the evolution process of those corresponding social behaviors by cross-species studies.

Circuitry Mechanisms of Rat Empathetic Behavior 

Empathy refers to the capability of a subject to stand in another individual's situation and experience the feelings of the latter. As a sophisticated psychological process, empathy is vital for individuals to live in a society. In addition, abnormalities in this ability are closely related to mental diseases, such as autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and schizophrenia. Initially, researchers defined empathy as unique to humans and apes. Recently, increasing evidence shows that empathy is evolutionally conserved from rodents to humans. Although advanced empathic behaviors, such as perspective–taking, have not been defined in rodents, the primary form of empathy--emotional contagion is present in rodents. Among emotional contagion behaviors, social transmission of fear is the most studied. We modified the Kim’s paradigm used in previous studies to more robustly assess social transmission of fear in foot-shock experienced rats. We found ACC projections to the MDL function in vicarious freezing and ablation or activation of MDL-projected ACC neurons delayed or decrease the vicarious freezing behavior respectively, confirming that these projections specifically modulate this behavior. We will continue our work on dissecting more detailed circuitry mechanism underlying rat empathy-related behaviors. In addition, we are also interested in how social isolation affects rat’s behavior and whether this is mediated through the empathy mechanisms, as we found in our experiments that social isolated rats displayed many deficits in social behaviors.

Cross-species study of the evolution of animal cooperative behavior 

Cooperation has generally been attributed to a cognitively demanding, complex social behavior that two or more individuals act together to achieve a common goal. The ability of cooperation is key to surviving. However, the details of how and why cooperation evolved remain unclear. Thus, “How Did Cooperative Behavior Evolve?” ranked No. 16 in the 125 most important scientific questions asked by the Science magazine. Animal behavior researchers and behavioral geneticists are trying to understand the genetic basis and molecular drivers of animal cooperative behaviors. As neuroscientists, we are interested in dissecting the neural mechanisms underlying animal cooperative behaviors and their evolution processes. Therefore, we devised a novel temporal coordination task to quantitatively assess the cooperative ability of animal. The beauty of our novel cooperative paradigm is that it is suitable for different model animals, such as mouse, rat, tree shrew and marmoset, rendering us the ability of cross-species study of animal cooperative behavior. Our preliminary results demonstrated that the cooperative ability ranked in such an order, tree shrew > rat > mouse. We also recorded the activities of neural ensemble in rat brain during the cooperative task, and found the evidence of neuronal activities in several brain region encoding different information related to cooperation. Our research is aimed to identify neurons and neural circuits encoding the information of cooperation, and to find out the driving force in the neural networks for the evolution of cooperative behavior by cross-species studies.