High-order social interactions in groups of mice

Abstract

Social behavior in mammals is often studied in pairs under artificial conditions, yet groups may rely on more complicated social structures. Here, we use a novel system for tracking multiple animals in a rich environment to characterize the nature of group behavior and interactions, and show strongly correlated group behavior in mice. We have found that the minimal models that rely only on individual traits and pairwise correlations between animals are not enough to capture group behavior, but that models that include third-order interactions give a very accurate description of the group. These models allow us to infer social interaction maps for individual groups. Using this approach, we show that environmental complexity during adolescence affects the collective group behavior of adult mice, in particular altering the role of high-order structure. Our results provide new experimental and mathematical frameworks for studying group behavior and social interactions.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.00759.001

Association between exploratory activity and social individuality in genetically identical mice living in the same enriched environment

“…If we accept the idea that the function of new neurons lies in providing flexibility, when new information has to be integrated into pre-established contexts (Dupret et al, 2007;Garthe et al, 2009;Burghardt et al, 2012), a broadly roaming individual might indeed encounter more of such situations than an animal preferring to stay in or near the group. The results of Shemesh et al (2013) suggest that with the experience of complex environments, the inner-group complexity of behaviors actually decreases.…”

“…Despite lack of obvious agonistic behavior (fighting over territory etc.) in our experiment, places of preference will have emerged due to avoidance or following of certain other mice (Shemesh et al, 2013). Due to specific social constellations, some mice might have been able to move more freely than others, which in turn could affect the way in which the group used the environment.…”

“…Shemesh and colleagues have reported that mice exposed to an enriched environment during adolescence became more individualistic than under control conditions, in the sense of a weaker dependency between the behavior of individual mice (Shemesh et al, 2013). They drew their conclusion from a detailed analysis of social interactions among the mice based on joint spatial configurations derived from a video-based tracking system.…”

Automated measurement of mouse social behaviors using depth sensing, video tracking, and machine learning

“…This presents a dual challenge to automated behavior classification: first, to accurately extract a representation of an animal's posture from observed data, and second, to map that representation to the correct behavior (24)(25)(26)(27). Current machine vision algorithms that track social interactions in mice mainly use the relative positions of two animals (25,(28)(29)(30); this approach generally cannot discriminate social interactions that involve close proximity and vigorous physical activity, or identify specific behaviors such as aggression and mounting. In addition, existing algorithms that measure social interactions use a set of hardcoded, "hand-crafted" (i.e., predefined) parameters that make them difficult to adapt to new experimental setups and conditions (25,31).…”

Information socialtaxis and efficient collective behavior emerging in groups of information-seeking agents

“…In nature, many species, including bacteria (15), amoebae (16), insects (17,18), fish (19), birds (3), and mammals (20,21), display complex group behavior, including foraging. The mechanisms that underlie group behavior have been of great experimental and theoretical interest, focusing on the computation that each individual performs (22)(23)(24) and emergent collective behavior (24,25).…”