Institute of Neuroscience, State Key Laboratory of Neuroscience, CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science & Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200031, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.
Institute of Neuroscience, State Key Laboratory of Neuroscience, CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science & Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200031, China.
Cell Rep. 2021 Nov 16;37(7):110029. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2021.110029.
Cooperation is common in nature and is pivotal to the development of human society. However, the details of how and why cooperation evolved remain poorly understood. Cross-species investigation of cooperation may help to elucidate the evolution of cooperative strategies. Thus, we design an automated cooperative behavioral paradigm and quantitatively examine the cooperative abilities and strategies of mice, rats, and tree shrews. We find that social communication plays a key role in the establishment of cooperation and that increased cooperative ability and a more efficient cooperative strategy emerge as a function of the evolutionary hierarchy of the tested species. Moreover, we demonstrate that single-unit activities in the orbitofrontal and prelimbic cortex in rats represent neural signals that may be used to distinguish between the cooperative and non-cooperative tasks, and such signals are distinct from the reward signals. Both signals may represent distinct components of the internal drive for cooperation.
合作在自然界中很常见，是人类社会发展的关键。然而，合作是如何以及为何进化的细节仍知之甚少。对跨物种合作的研究可能有助于阐明合作策略的进化。因此，我们设计了一个自动化的合作行为范式，并定量研究了小鼠、大鼠和树鼩的合作能力和策略。我们发现社会交流在合作的建立中起着关键作用，随着被测试物种进化层次的提高，合作能力和更有效的合作策略也随之出现。此外，我们证明大鼠眶额皮质和前额叶皮层的单个单元活动代表了可能用于区分合作和非合作任务的神经信号，并且这些信号与奖励信号不同。这两种信号都可能代表合作内部驱动力的不同组成部分。
