# Neural basis of collective behavior during environmental stress

> **NIH NIH K99** · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES · 2023 · $122,028

## Abstract

Project Summary
 Social interactions are critical to the physical and emotional health of a wide variety of species.
Perturbations in social functioning, a hallmark symptom of many psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders
such as autism and schizophrenia, can profoundly impair an individual’s ability to sustain healthy social relations.
While a growing body of literature has elucidated neural circuits for dyadic social interactions (interactions
between two individuals), our understanding of higher order interactions at the level of larger groups is
remarkably weak. Humans and other species organize themselves into social groups, in which the behavior of
each individual both contributes to and benefits from the cohesiveness and well-being of the collective. Social
groups serve as a context for sharing of resources, buffering of stress, regulation of homeostatic needs, and a
reservoir of cognitive capacity to solve problems and respond to environmental challenges. In order to address
this gap in the literature, I am using a novel behavioral approach to study how groups of mice self-organize into
huddles in response to a cold temperature thermal challenge. Prior studies examining social groups have been
limited by lack of technology to track the pose and identity of each mouse over the duration of a session. To
address these challenges, I am using novel multi-animal pose estimation tools developed through computer
vision to quantitatively identify huddling configurations in groups of four mice. Furthermore, I am combining this
automated behavioral tracking with circuit dissection tools to understand which circuits in the brain coordinate
huddling in response to thermal challenge. Published work from our lab and others suggests that medial
prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is a critical node involved in regulating group level behaviors and inter-brain dynamics
across species. However, the contribution of mPFC and its descending projections to group huddling has never
been explored. Furthermore, although whole-brain knockout studies have found that the social hormone oxytocin
is necessary for huddling in mice, the precise neural circuits that are engaged by oxytocin to promote huddling
never been examined. The experiments described in this proposal will fill a critical gap in our understanding of
neural mechanisms for collective behavior by performing detailed quantitative behavioral analysis and neural
circuit dissection to physiologically observe, computationally model, and functionally manipulate individual
descending projections of the dmPFC during huddling. Using an ethologically relevant group behavior, in vivo
freely moving calcium imaging, chemogenetic manipulations, and anatomical mapping, the proposed study will
test the hypothesis that oxytocin engages discrete, anatomically-defined pathways descending from the dmPFC
to promote group huddling. These results will set the foundation for a more incisive analysis of how dmPFC
circuits shape social ...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10740543
- **Project number:** 1K99MH133159-01A1
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES
- **Principal Investigator:** Tara Raam
- **Activity code:** K99 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2023
- **Award amount:** $122,028
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2023-07-03 → 2025-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10740543

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10740543, Neural basis of collective behavior during environmental stress (1K99MH133159-01A1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-27 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10740543. Licensed CC0.

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