title: A Social Reinforcement Learning Hypothesis of Mutual Reward Preferences in Rats.
abstract: Although the use of neuroimaging techniques has revealed much about the neural correlates of social decision making (SDM) in humans, it remains poorly understood how social stimuli are represented, and how social decisions are implemented at the neural level in humans and in other species. To address this issue, the establishment of novel animal paradigms allowing a broad spectrum of neurobiological causal manipulations and neurophysiological recordings provides an exciting tool to investigate the neural implementation of social valuation in the brain. Here, we discuss the potential of a rodent model, Rattus norvegicus, for the understanding of SDM and its neural underpinnings. Particularly, we consider recent data collected in a rodent prosocial choice task within a social reinforcement framework and discuss factors that could drive SDM in rodents.
authors.affiliation: Department of Comparative Psychology, Institute of Experimental Psychology, Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, 40225, Germany. julien.her@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Julen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hernandez-Lallement
authors.affiliation: Department of Comparative Psychology, Institute of Experimental Psychology, Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, 40225, Germany.
authors.forename: Marijn
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: van Wingerden
authors.affiliation: Department of Comparative Psychology, Institute of Experimental Psychology, Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, 40225, Germany.
authors.forename: Sandra
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Schäble
authors.affiliation: Department of Comparative Psychology, Institute of Experimental Psychology, Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, 40225, Germany.
authors.forename: Tobias
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Kalenscher
mesh_terms: D000679:Amygdala / Q000502:physiology*; D000818:Animals; D002755:Choice Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D051381:Rats; D012056:Reinforcement, Social; D012201:Reward
keywords: Amygdala; Mutual reward preference; Prosocial; Rat; Social reinforcement learning