Presenter(s): Adeline Fecker—Biology
Faculty Mentor(s): Phil Washbourne
Session 6: Interact & React
Disruption in social behavior is characteristic of Autism Spectrum Disorder, a neurodevelopmental disorder that appears in early childhood . Previous experiments in zebrafish showed lesioning of the ventral forebrain reduced social engagement . Results also suggested subjects must be able to see each other to socialize (Stednitz, 2018) . Subsequent experiments demonstrated that zebrafish can interact without vision, perhaps using their other senses like the water-pressure mechanosensory and olfactory system . Our study investigates how sensory modalities contribute to social behavior . Measuring behavior in an open field allows for quantification of complex social behaviors like orienting, following, and dispersing . We manipulated sensory modalities by recording behavior in the dark and lateral line ablated conditions . Our results show the loss of the visual input causes a 20% reduction in orienting behaviors but no reduction in following behavior . When we ablate visual input and mechanosensation, we do not observe a reduction in orienting or following behaviors . Another outstanding question is which brain regions are activated during social behavior by the contributing senses . We use whole brain immunolabeling with neuronal activity markers as an unbiased approach to identifying and quantifying active brain regions in social and alone conditions . We found the anterior dorsal pallium of the forebrain is significantly more active in social than alone conditions . Further analysis will reveal regions of activity due to manipulated sensory modalities . Our study of behavior and corresponding brain activity sheds light on the importance of sensory modalities and the anterior dorsal pallium in social behavior of zebrafish .