Neurodevelopmental timing of social learning in mice

Observational learning constitutes a key feature in mammals’ evolution, including mice. Unlike trial-and-error strategies, it constitutes a more efficient learning approach. Indeed, by witnessing a demonstrator’s behavior, an observer can detect the action-outcome relationship avoiding risks of wrong choices. Despite previous studies reported this ability in mice, it remains unclear how it emerges and evolves across neurodevelopment. In this study, we investigate how observational learning progresses across development in mice and how social cognition shapes it. In a food-sharing task, observer mice at post-natal day (PND) 45 and 60 witnessed adult demonstrators exhibiting either prosocial or selfish tendencies. After observation, PND45 and PND60 mice were tested as performers in the same task. We quantified observers’ social coherence through a Learning Index and found a positive correlation with demonstrators’ prosociality, suggesting that models’ social tendencies could shape observers’ social learning. Furthermore, demonstrators’ social preference exerts differential effects across development: PND45 mice showed increased susceptibility to selfish models, whereas PND60 mice were more influenced by prosocial ones. Procedural learning was quantified by the number of responses: while PND60 observers learned from adults, PND45 successfully learned only when paired with age-matched demonstrators, suggesting a developmental constraint on cross-age social learning. Together, these findings reveal a developmental shift in the social valence of models guiding observational learning, with selfishness exerting greater impact during early adolescence and prosociality predominating in later stages. Ongoing experiments combining automated behavioral tracking and activity-dependent neuronal tagging will investigate the neural circuits underlying these age-dependent social learning mechanisms.