Cognition, Behavior, and Memory
Author: Javier Gonzalez Sanabria | email: javiergs89@gmail.com
Javier Gonzalez Sanabria 1°, María Florencia Santos 1°, Juan Emilio Belforte 1°, Camila Zold 1°
1° Grupo de Neurociencia de Sistemas, Instituto de Fisiología y Biofísica, IFIBIO-Houssay, UBA-CONICET
Schizophrenia (SZ) is a complex neuropsychiatric disease that affects the way patients think and cope with daily life including poor social functioning. Recent studies in mouse models have focused on the social cognition impairments related to SZ. Previously, we reported that restricted ablation of NMDA receptors in cortical GABAergic interneurons during early postnatal development results in a SZ-like phenotype in adulthood (KO). The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) controls many high cognitive functions impaired in SZ including aspects of social interactions. However, it remains unclear how mPFC ensembles encode social information and how this representation might be disrupted in SZ. In this work we recorded the activity of putative pyramidal mPFC neurons in KO and control mice while they performed a discrimination task on an enriched linear track with an encaged social target (novel adult male) on one end and an encaged novel object on the other. Here we identified cortical ensembles of coding neurons capable of responding to different aspects of the task, including a preference for the social or the object side. Furthermore, KO animals displayed a lower proportion of discriminating neurons and an impoverished ensemble dynamics that could explain the behavioral alterations observed with a re-exposure to the task. These findings help to elucidate how mPFC assigns cognitive resources to encode social information and how this representation becomes altered in SZ.