Laboratory of Behavioral Physiology, Department of Biomedicine, Neuroscience and Advanced Diagnostics (Bi.N.D.), Human Physiology Section "Giuseppe Pagano", University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy.
Department of Psychology, University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, AB, Canada.
Sci Rep. 2024 Sep 6;14(1):20877. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-71428-w.
The study of social interactions lies at the core of several disciplines such as psychiatry, psychology and ethology, just to name a few. In this context, understanding the temporal patterns underlying interactive behaviors is of crucial importance. Here, we employed T-pattern detection and analysis to study social interactions in ten pairs of Wistar rats tested in an Open-Field environment. We found four different categories of interactive behaviors. One of them was of particular interest to us because it consisted of behavioral events that, taken individually, should not underlie an interaction of any kind; however, they were included in T-patterns, which is suggestive of a dyadic temporal coordination in the behavioral expression of two individuals. Within this category, we described for the first time a new subcategory of apparent interaction patterns characterized by events that one of the two rats repeats only if previously produced by the partner (i.e., behavioral mirroring). These findings are discussed in functional terms for rodents and in light of our current understanding of social interactions in humans.
社会互动的研究是精神病学、心理学和动物行为学等几个学科的核心，仅举几例。在这种情况下，了解交互行为背后的时间模式至关重要。在这里，我们采用 T 模式检测和分析的方法，在一个开放环境中测试的十对 Wistar 大鼠中研究社会互动。我们发现了四种不同类别的互动行为。其中一种行为特别引起了我们的兴趣，因为它由单个行为事件组成，这些行为事件本身不应该构成任何形式的相互作用；然而，它们被包含在 T 模式中，这表明两个人的行为表达存在一种二元时间协调。在这一类中，我们首次描述了一种新的交互模式亚类，其特征是如果由伙伴之前产生的话，两只老鼠中的一只老鼠会重复产生的事件（即行为镜像）。这些发现从功能上讨论了啮齿动物的行为，并结合了我们目前对人类社会互动的理解。
