What matters to a mouse?
Context, Courtship, and Communication
The primary question of my dissertation focuses on how varying levels of context affect social behavior and processing of signals during courtship. Context can broadly be defined as conditions that contribute to an individual’s understanding of an interaction, and different contextual factors can heavily influence how receivers respond to signals (Hurley & Kalcounis-Rueppell, 2018; Leger, 1993). Across my chapters, my questions evolve from looking at internal versus external pieces of context during an interaction to focusing on how more long-term external context factors, physical factors vs social factors, may differ in their importance to mice as they navigate subsequent social interactions. I do this by exploring the effects of the long-term social and physical aspects of a mouse’s living environment on their courtship behavior, responsiveness to courtship rejection, responsiveness to chronic and acute stressors, neurochemistry, and HPA activity.
Mice produce ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) during conspecific interactions. When interacting with females, males produce large amounts of these calls in order to promote courtship. Conversely, broadband vocalizations (BBVs), also known as squeaks are low frequency calls that females often produce when physically rejecting males.
Research in our lab has revealed that males will actually listen to these negative signals (the BBVs) and suppress their “courtship calls” (the USVs) in response.
Male mice modulate courtship behavior in response to negative female signals
What factors might influence the male response to these female calls?
What contextual factors can we investigate?
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When employing BBV playback, we can see how male behavior is altered in a variety of assays in response to and during recovery after these signals.
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My first chapter explores how males modulate their behavior during BBV playback when the odor of another male conspecific is present, simulating a “competition threat”.
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My current project involves exposing males to chronic social and/or physical environmental enrichment to assess how these experiences affect a variety of social behaviors.
Preliminary data suggests…
Social enrichment and physical enrichment may have opposing effects on male vocal response to female signals
Using a variety of assays, we can explore the effects of context on many different aspects of courtship behavior
Split-cage assay
Pioneered by Hood et al. (2023), this assay allows us to assess the effects of BBV playback on USVs decoupled from the physical rejection behaviors associated with BBVs.
Direct interaction
Direct interactions allow us to see the full array of courtship behaviors, and see how these behaviors may change after exposure to different interventions.
3-chamber sociability assay
This well-established assay allows us to see how close in proximity mice want to be with a contained social stimulus, and how this may vary when the mice are exposed to BBV playback.