Vocal communication is an important component of social interaction. Yet we understand very little of the neural and molecular mechanisms that allow us to share social information through vocal cues. One current limitation is the lack of laboratory models with sufficient vocal flexibility and complexity. Naked mole-rats are subterranean rodents with a highly specialized cooperative and hierarchical social structure. Colonies are organized to support a single breeding female and her progeny with numerous non-reproductive workers sharing communal tasks for colony maintenance and defense. This type of social organization, eusociality, which is common in many insects is rare in mammals. In fact, naked mole-rats are one of only two mammals that exhibit this type of extreme cooperative behavior. We previously identified that naked mole-rats are highly vocal, using vocalizations to communicate information about individual identity and colony membership. We are now focusing on understanding how the brain of the naked mole-rat is specialized to encode and decode socially meaningful sounds and how these representations are updated when social situations change. We are using a combination of neural recordings, molecular biology and behavioral monitoring to investigate how the brains of these animals are specialized to process and produce socially meaningful sounds. The overall objectives of the project are divided into three main projects aimed towards understanding (i) how social identity is encoded at the earliest stages of auditory processing within the naked mole-rat brain, (ii) how social interactions acting through transcriptomic and molecular mechanisms influence vocal behaviors and finally (iii) how neural circuits for vocal production are shaped by auditory environments during development. This work has the potential to not only expand our understanding of the neural architecture underling the sensory coding and the production of vocalizations, but also to provide insights into complex social behaviors such as empathy and altruism.
