This study investigated the neural mechanisms underlying the association between social identity and reward value in male mice using Go-NoGo social discrimination paradigms. The results showed that mice could discriminate individual conspecifics through brief nose-to-nose investigation, a process dependent on the dorsal hippocampus. Two-photon calcium imaging revealed that dorsal CA1 hippocampal neurons represented reward expectation during social tasks, persisting over days regardless of the associated mouse. A dynamically changing subset of CA1 neurons accurately discriminated between individual mice. These findings suggest CA1 neuronal activity is a neural substrate for associative social memory.

Eunji Kong, Kyu-Hee Lee, Jongrok Do, Pilhan Kim, Doyun Lee