Author response: Dynamic encoding of social threat and spatial context in the hypothalamus

Krzywkowski, Piotr; Penna, Beatrice; Gross, Cornelius

doi:10.7554/elife.57148.sa2

Cited by 2 publications

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“…For the analysis of neuronal response properties, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were calculated using custom Python scripts (scikit-learn) ( Krzywkowski and Penna, 2020 ). Briefly, all frames in a selected calcium imaging recording were scored as either positive of negative for a particular behavior and a ROC curve was generated for each neuron by plotting the true positive and false positive rates across the distribution.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamic encoding of social threat and spatial context in the hypothalamus

Krzywkowski

Penna

Gross

2020

eLife

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Social aggression and avoidance are defensive behaviors expressed by territorial animals in a manner appropriate to spatial context and experience. The ventromedial hypothalamus controls both social aggression and avoidance, suggesting that it may encode a general internal state of threat modulated by space and experience. Here, we show that neurons in the mouse ventromedial hypothalamus are activated both by the presence of a social threat as well as by a chamber where social defeat previously occurred. Moreover, under conditions where the animal could move freely between a home and defeat chamber, firing activity emerged that predicted the animal’s position, demonstrating the dynamic encoding of spatial context in the hypothalamus. Finally, we found that social defeat induced a functional reorganization of neural activity as optogenetic activation could elicit avoidance after, but not before social defeat. These findings reveal how the hypothalamus dynamically encodes spatial and sensory cues to drive social behaviors.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamic encoding of social threat and spatial context in the hypothalamus

Krzywkowski

Penna

Gross

2020

eLife

Self Cite

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Behavior is movement only but how to interpret it? Problems and pitfalls in translational neuroscience—a 40-year experience

Lipp

Wolfer

2022

Front. Behav. Neurosci.

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Translational research in behavioral neuroscience seeks causes and remedies for human mental health problems in animals, following leads imposed by clinical research in psychiatry. This endeavor faces several problems because scientists must read and interpret animal movements to represent human perceptions, mood, and memory processes. Yet, it is still not known how mammalian brains bundle all these processes into a highly compressed motor output in the brain stem and spinal cord, but without that knowledge, translational research remains aimless. Based on some four decades of experience in the field, the article identifies sources of interpretation problems and illustrates typical translational pitfalls. (1) The sensory world of mice is different. Smell, hearing, and tactile whisker sensations dominate in rodents, while visual input is comparatively small. In humans, the relations are reversed. (2) Mouse and human brains are equated inappropriately: the association cortex makes up a large portion of the human neocortex, while it is relatively small in rodents. The predominant associative cortex in rodents is the hippocampus itself, orchestrating chiefly inputs from secondary sensorimotor areas and generating species-typical motor patterns that are not easily reconciled with putative human hippocampal functions. (3) Translational interpretation of studies of memory or emotionality often neglects the ecology of mice, an extremely small species surviving by freezing or flight reactions that do not need much cognitive processing. (4) Further misinterpretations arise from confounding neuronal properties with system properties, and from rigid mechanistic thinking unaware that many experimentally induced changes in the brain do partially reflect unpredictable compensatory plasticity. (5) Based on observing hippocampal lesion effects in mice indoors and outdoors, the article offers a simplistic general model of hippocampal functions in relation to hypothalamic input and output, placing hypothalamus and the supraspinal motor system at the top of a cerebral hierarchy. (6) Many translational problems could be avoided by inclusion of simple species-typical behaviors as end-points comparable to human cognitive or executive processing, and to rely more on artificial intelligence for recognizing patterns not classifiable by traditional psychological concepts.

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Author response: Dynamic encoding of social threat and spatial context in the hypothalamus

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Dynamic encoding of social threat and spatial context in the hypothalamus

Dynamic encoding of social threat and spatial context in the hypothalamus

Behavior is movement only but how to interpret it? Problems and pitfalls in translational neuroscience—a 40-year experience

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