Social aggression and avoidance are defensive behaviors expressed by territorial animals in a manner appropriate to spatial context and experience. The ventromedial hypothalamus controls both social aggression and avoidance, suggesting that it may encode a general internal state of threat modulated by space and experience. Here, we show that neurons in the mouse ventromedial hypothalamus are activated both by the presence of a social threat as well as by a chamber where social defeat previously occurred. Moreover, under conditions where the animal could move freely between a home and defeat chamber, firing activity emerged that predicted the animal’s position, demonstrating the dynamic encoding of spatial context in the hypothalamus. Finally, we found that social defeat induced a functional reorganization of neural activity as optogenetic activation could elicit avoidance after, but not before social defeat. These findings reveal how the hypothalamus dynamically encodes spatial and sensory cues to drive social behaviors.

中文翻译：

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下丘脑社会威胁和空间环境的动态编码

社会攻击和回避是领地动物以适合空间背景和经验的方式表达的防御行为。腹内侧下丘脑控制着社会攻击性和回避性，这表明它可能编码一种受空间和经验调节的一般内部威胁状态。在这里，我们展示了小鼠腹内侧下丘脑中的神经元被社会威胁的存在以及之前发生社会失败的房间激活。此外，在动物可以在家庭和失败房间之间自由移动的条件下，出现了预测动物位置的射击活动，证明了下丘脑空间环境的动态编码。最后，我们发现社交失败会引起神经活动的功能重组，因为光遗传学激活可以在社交失败之后而不是在社交失败之前引发回避。这些发现揭示了下丘脑如何动态编码空间和感官线索以驱动社会行为。