Movement Mondays

October 26th - Dr. Alyse N. Maksimoski

The making of a social brain: relationships between social experiences and neurobiology, from air to sea

Summary: Although progress has been made in understanding evolutionary patterns in sociality, little is known about how individual differences in social experiences are reinforced through proximate neurobiological mechanisms. My work has focused on non-model species to better understand the role of individual differences, behavioral plasticity, and their associated differences in neurobiology. My doctoral work on European starlings provided novel evidence that songs sung in flocks reinforce flock cohesion by linking the reward experienced from singing to the social environment in which that song is produced, thereby coupling the presence of conspecifics themselves to reward, motivation, and the reduction of a negative state. These findings highlighted the role of individual variation in flock experience and how this variation is linked to opioid- and dopamine-related factors. In my postdoctoral work on bluebanded gobies (a bi-directionally sex changing fish), I explore how changing environments impact behavioral phenotypes in a fish species with huge individual variation across and within individuals. Through environmental manipulations, we can directly observe the behavioral resilience of parenting males, as well as how individuals change their behavior, morphology, physiology, and biochemistry across the sex change axis based purely on shifts in their social environmental composition. My research is helping to uncover how complex animals’ social lives are and what makes a social brain.