Department of Neuroscience, Columbia University, New York, New York, USA.
Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain and Behavior Institute, New York, New York, USA.
J Neuroendocrinol. 2023 Jul;35(7):e13307. doi: 10.1111/jne.13307. Epub 2023 Jun 5.
Parental care is crucial for the survival of all mammalian species. Given the evolutionary importance of parenting, this behavioral repertoire must be supported by circuitry that is innate but also capable of learning and flexibility - adjusting to changing environmental demands. In rodents, parental care is triggered by the perception of cues emitted by a pup. Caregiver-pup interactions are often composed of multimodal sensory stimuli that require caregivers to integrate across sensory modalities. In this review, we focus on two sensory modalities essential for the parental experience: smell and hearing. We examine how smell and hearing are combined with other senses to identify offspring in need of care. Understanding how multimodal stimuli are integrated in the caregiver brain to inform parental behavior is an important step in understanding the circuitry that underlies this complex and crucial behavioral repertoire. In this review, we will discuss recent advances in the field of rodent parental behavior, highlighting studies that have begun to disentangle the neural circuitry that processes the multisensory cues that are involved in caregiver-offspring interactions.
父母照顾对于所有哺乳动物物种的生存至关重要。鉴于父母照顾行为在进化上的重要性，这种行为模式必须由先天的但也能够学习和灵活适应的电路来支持——以适应不断变化的环境需求。在啮齿动物中，父母照顾是由幼崽发出的线索感知触发的。照顾者-幼崽的互动通常由多模态感觉刺激组成，需要照顾者整合各种感觉模式。在这篇综述中，我们重点关注对父母体验至关重要的两种感觉模式：嗅觉和听觉。我们研究了嗅觉和听觉如何与其他感觉相结合，以识别需要照顾的后代。了解多模态刺激如何在照顾者大脑中整合，以告知父母行为，是理解支持这种复杂而关键行为模式的电路的重要一步。在这篇综述中，我们将讨论啮齿动物父母行为领域的最新进展，强调了那些开始解开涉及照顾者-幼崽相互作用的多感觉线索的神经电路的研究。
