Social Neuroscience

Social behaviors are crucial for animals and humans. We study social neuroscience – and we ask: What are the neural codes that underlie sociality? To investigate this, we capitalize on the extreme sociality of bats. We perform experiments in pairs of bats, as well as in groups of socially-interacting bats – both males and females.

Our discoveries include

• We discovered a population of hippocampal neurons that represent the spatial position of a conspecific bat; these "social place-cells" may underlie social-spatial cognition in bats and other mammals.
• In pairs of bats flying in the long tunnel, hippocampal neurons exhibited extreme dynamism of the neural code – rapidly switching between coding position when flying alone, to jointly coding position x distance when encountering another bat.
• We discovered time-cells for self and other, including social time-cells – which represented the position × time of action of other individuals; these time-cells may support the perception of interval timing, episodic memory, and temporal coordination between self and others – which are crucial capacities for collective behaviors.
• We conducted a study in a highly naturalistic social group of bats, and discovered that hippocampal CA1 neurons represented the positions of both self and others, and encoded the identity, sex, hierarchy, and affiliation of multiple other individuals – a highly elaborate social-spatial representation. Thus, the hippocampus forms a multidimensional social-spatial cognitive map of the natural world.