Social behavior is developed over the lifetime of an organism and the neuropeptide oxytocin (OXT) modulates social behaviors across vertebrate species, and is associated with neuro-developmental social deficits such as autism. However, whether OXT plays a role in the developmental maturation of neural systems that are necessary for social behavior remains poorly explored. We show that proper behavioral and neural response to social stimuli depends on a developmental process orchestrated by OXT neurons. Animals whose OXT system is ablated in early life show blunted neuronal and behavioral responses to social stimuli as well as wide ranging disruptions in the functional connectivity of the social brain. We provide a window into the mechanisms underlying OXT-dependent developmental processes that implement adult sociality.
Group living animals can use social and asocial cues to predict the presence of a reward or a punishment in the environment through associative learning. The degree to which social and asocial learning share the same mechanisms is still a matter of …
We study a general epidemic model with arbitrary recovery rate distributions. Our analytical solution is able to predict the shift in the critical properties induced by heterogeneous recovery rates. We find that the critical value of infectivity tends to be smaller than the one predicted by quenched mean-field approaches in the homogeneous case and that it can be linked to the variance of the recovery rates.