Biology subjects

Ben-Ami Bartal, I.

Publications and source records attributed to Ben-Ami Bartal, I..

5 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Early life adversity enhances prosocial helping towards a cagemate and reshapes brain-wide neural activity and network organization

Early life adversity (ELA) is linked to changes in social behavior and emotional regulation and to increased risk for developing mood and conduct disorders. However, the effects of ELA on empathy and its associated behaviors, including prosocial helping, remain poorly understood. Animal models of ELA provide a tractable way to study how early rearing conditions impact prosocial behavior and underlying neural circuitry. In the current study, adult male and female rats reared under maternal separation (MS) or control conditions were tested in a helping behavior task in which they could release a trapped cagemate. Behavior was assessed across repeated testing sessions and brain-wide neural activity was quantified using c-Fos on the final test day. Contrary to our hypothesis, we found that MS-reared rats showed more consistent helping behavior, with shorter latencies to help on average, compared to control-reared animals. In addition, MS-reared rats displayed increased social play following release. At the neural level, MS-reared rats displayed more c-Fos expression across multiple brain regions, including prefrontal, amygdala, sensory, and striatal regions involved in motivation and social decision making. Network analyses further revealed altered functional connectivity in ELA-reared animals, with heightened connectivity in stress-related regions such as the lateral habenula. Together, these findings demonstrate that ELA impacts prosocial helping behavior and is associated with widespread changes in neural activity and network organization. This work provides insight into how early adversity shapes social motivation and the neural systems supporting prosocial behaviors.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2024

Helping behavior is associated with increased affiliative behavior, activation of the prosocial brain network and elevated oxytocin receptor expression in the nucleus accumbens

A prosocial response to others in distress is increasingly recognized as a natural behavior for many social species, from humans to rodents. While prosocial behavior is more frequently observed towards familiar conspecifics, even within the same social context some individuals are more prone to help than others. For instance, in a rat helping behavior test, rats can release a distressed conspecific trapped inside a restrainer by opening the restrainer door. Typically, rats are motivated to release a trapped cagemate, and consistently release the trapped rat ( openers), yet around 30% do not open the restrainer ( non-openers). To characterize the difference between these populations, behavioral and neural activity were compared between opener and non-opener rats tested with a trapped cagemate in the helping test. Behaviorally, openers showed significantly more social affiliative behavior both before and after door-opening compared to non-openers. Analysis of brain-wide neural activity based on the immediate early gene c-Fos revealed increased activity in openers in the previously identified prosocial neural network compared to non-openers. The network includes regions associated with empathy in humans (somatosensory cortex, insula, cingulate cortex and frontal cortex), and motivation and reward regions such as the nucleus accumbens. Oxytocin receptor mRNA expression levels were higher in the accumbens but not the anterior insula. Several transcription control pathways were also significantly upregulated in openers accumbens. These findings indicate that prosocial behavior may be predicted by affiliative behavior and activity in the prosocial neural network and provide targets for the investigation of causal mechanisms underlying prosocial behavior. Significance StatementProsocial behavior is observed in many social species, including rodents, yet the determinants underlying why some animals help and others do not is poorly understood. Here, we show behavioral and neural differences between prosocial and non-prosocial pairs in a rat helping behavior test, with increased social interaction and nucleus accumbens oxytocin receptor gene expression in animals that helped.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2023

Brain-wide activity-identity mapping of neural networks associated with prosocial motivation in rats

A prosocial response to others in distress is an important driver of behavior across social species. To investigate the neurobiological mechanism leading to prosocial behavior, we use a helping behavior test wherein rats may release a trapped conspecific by opening a restrainer door. To ensure rats were not acting for social interaction, a separation divider prevented post-release contact ("separated" test). Despite the divider, most rats consistently opened the restrainer, demonstrating prosocial motivation. Brain-wide c-Fos analysis conducted via our opensource software "Brainways", revealed activity in empathy-related regions, including the anterior cingulate and insular cortices. Nucleus accumbens activity, previously recorded during helping, was not significant in the "separated" test. Chemogenetic manipulations of the accumbens did not prevent helping, suggesting that its activity reflects contact seeking. Mapping of oxytocin and dopamine receptors on active cells revealed region-specific recruitment of these subpopulations, depending on the social context. Network connectivity analysis highlights context-dependent functional subcircuits.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2023

Brainways: An Open-Source AI-based Software For Registration and Analysis of Fluorescent Markers on Coronal Brain Slices

A central current trend in neuroscience involves the identification of brain-wide neural circuits associated with complex behavior. A major challenge for this approach involves the laborious process for registration and quantification of fluorescence on histological brain slices, as well as the difficulty of deriving functional insight from the complex resulting datasets. As a solution, we developed Brainways, a simple-to-use AI-based open-source software for the identification of neural networks involved in a specific behavior, from digital images to network analysis. Brainways offers automatic registration of coronal slices to any 3D brain atlas, and provides quantification of fluorescent markers (e.g. activity marker, tracer) per region, as well as statistical comparisons with visual mapping of contrasts between conditions. A built-in partial least squares task analysis provides the neural patterns associated with a specific contrast, as well as network graph analysis representing functional connectivity. Trained on atlases for rats and mice, Brainways currently provides above 80% atlas registration accuracy and allows the user to easily adjust the outputs for better fit. Below, a case study validation of Brainways is demonstrated on a previously published data set describing the neural correlates of empathic helping behavior in rats. The original results were successfully replicated and expanded upon, due to the exponentially larger sample size that covered over a 100 times more brain tissue compared to the original manual sampling. Brainways thus provides a fast, accurate solution for quantification of large-scale projects and facilitates novel neurobiological insights about the structural and functional neural networks involved in complex behavior. Brainways has a highly accessible GUI and is functionality exposed through a Python-based API, which can be enhanced for different applications.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2021

Adolescent rats extend help to outgroup members, highlighting a neural network for group identity categorization.

Prosocial behavior, in particular helping others in need, occurs preferentially in response to the perceived distress of ones own group members, or ingroup. The development of neural mechanisms underlying social selectivity towards ingroup members are not well established. Here, we used a rat helping behavior test to explore the development and neural basis of ingroup bias for prosocial behavior in adolescent rats. We previously found that adult rats selectively help others from their own social group, and that this selectivity is associated with activation in reward and motivation circuits. Surprisingly, we found that adolescent rats helped both ingroup and outgroup members, evidence suggesting that ingroup bias emerges in adulthood. Analysis of brain-wide neural activity, indexed by expression of the early-immediate gene c-Fos, revealed increased activity for ingroup members across a broad set of regions, which was congruent for adults and adolescents. However, adolescents showed reduced hippocampal and insular activity, and increased orbitofrontal cortex activity compared to adults. Adolescent rats who did not help trapped others also demonstrated increased amygdala connectivity. Together, these findings demonstrate that biases for group-dependent prosocial behavior develop with age in rats and suggest that specific brain regions contribute to this prosocial selectivity, overall pointing to possible targets for the functional modulation of ingroup bias. One Sentence SummaryProsocial selectivity increases with age in parallel with hippocampal and insular activation, providing insight into the neural classification of group membership.

neuroscience↗