Biology subjects

Gazzola, V.

Publications and source records attributed to Gazzola, V..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2018

Cingulate dependent social risk assessment in rats

Social transmission of distress has been conceived of as a one-way phenomenon in which an observer catches the emotions of another. Here we use a paradigm in which an observer rat witnesses another receive electro-shocks. Bayesian model comparison and Granger causality argue against this one-way vision in favor of bidirectional information transfer: how the observer reacts to the demonstrators distress influences the behavior of the demonstrator. Intriguingly, this was true to a similar extent across highly familiar and entirely unfamiliar rats. Injecting muscimol in the anterior cingulate of observers reduced freezing in the observers and in the demonstrators receiving the shocks. That rats share the distress of unfamiliar strains is at odds with evolutionary thinking that empathy should be biased towards close individuals. Using simulations, we support the complementary notion that distress transmission could be selected to more efficiently detect dangers in a group.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2018

Emotional Mirrors in the Rat’s Anterior Cingulate Cortex

AbstractHow do the emotions of others affect us? The human anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) responds while experiencing pain in the self and witnessing pain in others, but underlying cellular mechanisms remain poorly understood. Here we show the ACC (area 24) contains neurons responding when a rat experiences pain and while witnessing another receive footshocks. Most of these do not respond to a fear conditioned tone (CS). Deactivating this region reduces freezing while witnessing footshocks to others but not while hearing the CS. A decoder trained on spike counts while witnessing footshocks can decode the animals own pain intensity when experiencing pain. Mirror-like neurons thus exist in ACC that encode the pain of others in a code shared with pain but not fear in the self.\n\nOne Sentence SummaryACC contains neurons responding selectively when a rat witnesses anothers pain and experiences pain in the self.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2018

Where and how our brain represents the temporal structure of observed action

Reacting faster to the behavior of others provides evolutionary advantages. Reacting to unpredictable events takes hundreds of milliseconds. Understanding where and how the brain represents what actions are likely to follow one another is therefore important. Everyday actions are predictable sequences of acts, yet neuroscientists focus on how brains responds to unexpected, individual motor acts. Using fMRI we show the brain encodes sequence-specific information in the motor system. Using EEG, we show visual responses were faster and smaller for predictable sequences that recruit the motor system. This study shifts the study of action observation from single acts to motor sequences, informs how we adapt to the actions of others and suggests the motor system may implement perceptual predictive coding.

neuroscience↗