CAREER: Early-life social environments drive behavioral and neural mechanisms of development

Individuals are shaped by the experiences they have, particularly those that occur early in life. Although these social effects are well known to occur, social environments are complex, and strikingly little is known about which specific attributes of social experience actually cause changes in brain and behavior. This project fills a gap in knowledge that exists across species by identifying the causal elements of early-life social environments and uncovering the connections to the strong, long-term effects on the individual.

This project uses a highly social fish as a model system. It engineers and examines a variety of social experiences in detail as young fish develop, expanding our understanding of the richness of living in groups, and it identifies consequences of social experience for the brain, hormones, and behavior. Given that social effects are remarkably influential across all vertebrates, including humans, the results have far-reaching implications for how social environments experienced throughout life shape individuals into who they are—from behavior to health.

This project expands who contributes to knowledge-creation in this field through cutting-edge, interdisciplinary training of young scientists, from high school to postbaccalaureate, and professional development at regional and national conferences. Bringing this research into the classroom promotes scientific literacy among science majors and non-science majors, and increased access to knowledge about behavior, hormones, and the brain contributes to the development of an informed, healthy, and engaged American public.

Early-life social environments are powerful initiators of developmental plasticity, and the resulting changes are often long-lasting, or even permanent, and can facilitate locally adapted phenotypes. Because juveniles often spend a substantial portion of their time interacting with and observing others, social stimuli are among the most influential in the early environment.

The quantity, quality, and diversity of interactions and social sensory cues perceived accrue over development to form social experience. The objective of this research is to uncover the behavioral mechanisms—the causal attributes of social experience—that shape behavioral phenotype via persistent changes in underlying neural and neuroendocrine mechanisms.

This project uses the highly social and developmentally plastic African cichlid fish, Burton’s Mouthbrooder (Astatotilapia burtoni), to test how individual variation in early-life social experience shapes behavioral phenotype via plasticity in neuroendocrine stress axis and arginine vasopressin signaling. Using an integrative approach, this research reveals 1) the complexity of social experience, including as a result of direct interactions with more novel social partners in early life; 2) the development of vasopressin neuronal populations and glucocorticoid receptor (co)expression; and 3) the behavioral, endocrine, and neurotranscriptomic responses to an acute social experience across members of a social group.

This project is jointly funded by the Behavioral Systems Cluster and Neural Systems Cluster in the Division of Integrative and Organismal Systems.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.