Recognizing Others: Rodent's Social Memories

Abstract

We provide in this chapter a brief overview of the present knowledge about social memory in laboratory rodents with a focus on mice and rats. We discuss in the first part the relevance of the processing of olfactory cues for social recognition in these animals and present information about the brain areas involved in the generation of a long-term social memory including cellular mechanisms thought to underlie memory consolidation. In the second part, we suggest that sensory modalities beyond olfaction may also be important in contributing to the long-term social memory trace including audition and taction (and vision). The exposure to stimuli activating the auditory system and taction is able to produce interference phenomena at defined time points during the consolidation of social memory. This ability of such-nonsocial-stimuli may provide a new approach to dissect the brain processes underlying the generation of the social memory trace in further studies.

Keywords: Auditory stimuli; Behaviour; Memory consolidation; Mice; Olfaction; Rats; Retroactive interference; Social discrimination; Social memory.