Reward-based prosocial choices in mice

Abstract

Prosocial behaviors, actions that benefit others, are an essential part of the social life of humans and other animals, by promoting bonding and cohesion among individuals and groups. Here we present a new behavioural paradigm to assess prosociality in food foraging contexts in laboratory mice, based in our paradigm previously developed for rats. In this task, the decision-maker can choose between two options, one that will only provide rewards to itself (selfish choice) or one that will reward both itself and its cagemate (prosocial choice). Our work reveals that prosocial choices in male mice are not widespread and are only observed in a small proportion of animals. Using detailed analysis of behavior, we describe that recipients of help express different social cues in prosocial and selfish trials, but decision makers do not take them into account to guide their choices. Furthermore, we assess how the level of individual training and the physical layout of the paradigm might affect the performance in this social task. Only those mice with increased social attention (16% of the animals) display prosocial preferences, suggesting these to be rooted in similar behavioural factors and social interactions that we previously described in other work with rats.