The laboratory investigates the neural mechanisms by which the brain forms, consolidates, and retrieves episodic memories — with particular emphasis on social memory, the recognition of specific individuals and the recollection of past interactions with them. Using custom behavioral paradigms together with large-scale and wireless neural recording, it dissects how distributed circuits encode, transform, and integrate social, sensory, spatial, and emotional information at circuit and single-neuron resolution. This work aims to clarify the organizing principles of social cognition and to inform strategies for restoring social-processing function in cognitive and neuropsychiatric disorders.
1. Neural Mechanisms of Individual Recognition
How does the brain recognize who a social counterpart is and remember past interactions with them? Using a novel social discrimination paradigm — in which a subject mouse, recognizing familiar male littermates by scent, licks for reward only when a reward-associated individual appears — we combined two-photon calcium imaging with circuit inactivation to show that the dorsal CA1 region of the hippocampus is essential for individual recognition. Distinct populations of CA1 neurons represent different individuals, so that a partner's identity can be decoded from population activity even when the reward is held constant — overturning the prior view that social memory depends chiefly on CA2, and demonstrating that long-term memories of individuals can form.
Beyond these identity-coding cells, we discovered a separate population of reward-expectation neurons in dorsal CA1 that represent the positive value associated with particular individuals. These neurons responded selectively to reward-associated individuals but not to non-social odors, revealing a specialized role for CA1 in associative social memory that binds an individual's identity to the value of interacting with them. Building on this, we are now tracing how such representations are consolidated — showing, in collaborative work, that a prefrontal–nucleus accumbens circuit converts identity-specific codes into a durable, generalized sense of familiarity.
2. Neural Mechanisms of Social Motivation
This research explores how reward learning shapes social information processing within the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC).
We investigate the social motivation hypothesis, which proposes that autism spectrum disorder (ASD) stems from deficits in representing the reward value of social stimuli. Using a novel social cue-reward association paradigm, we examine how social and reward information integrate in the mPFC, and how disruptions to this integration might underlie social impairments in ASD.
3. Brain-Wide Computation for Social Recognition
Social recognition is not confined to a single brain region — it requires coordinated computation across distributed neural circuits.
Using Neuropixels probes, we simultaneously record neural activity across multiple brain regions (prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, olfactory sensory areas) while mice perform an olfactory delayed non-match-to-sample task. This approach reveals how distributed neural networks process multimodal social information and how these signals are integrated to form coherent social memories.
4. Neural Encoding of Mean Motion Direction
Beyond social cognition, we also study how the brain extracts statistical features from complex sensory stimuli.
In this project, we investigate how the primary visual cortex encodes mean motion direction from groups of dots moving in different directions — a classic example of ensemble perception. Mice demonstrate that they can extract the average motion direction from complex motion patterns, and we examine how this is represented at both the single-neuron and population levels.
Techniques & Approaches
Two-photon Calcium Imaging
Population-level imaging of neuronal activity in awake, behaving mice with single-cell resolution.
Neuropixels Recording
High-density silicon probes enabling simultaneous recording of hundreds of neurons across multiple brain areas.
Behavioral Paradigms
Precisely controlled social discrimination, reward association, and olfactory memory tasks.
Optogenetics & Pharmacogenetics
Causal manipulation of specific cell types and circuits to probe function.
Computational Analysis
Dimensionality reduction, population decoding, and statistical modeling in MATLAB and Python.
Animal Surgery
Chronic cranial window implantation, viral injections, and headpost surgery for long-term recordings.