Talk Alexis Faure "Toward a role of prefrontal cholinergic modulation of monoamines in social interaction in mouse ?"

Abstract

Social cognition refers to cognitive processes needed to process social cues in order to understand others’ behaviour and intention and to develop adapted social interactions. Social cognition impairments are common features of psychiatric disorders. In schizophrenia, disturbances in neurotransmitters, notably dopamine and serotonin, are well established as contributing to the symptoms of the disease. However, if brain circuits sustaining social cognition with role of finely tuned Excitation/Inhibition balance in prefrontal cortex (PFC) is describe, the role of neuromodulators like acetylcholine (Ach) and its modulation of monoamine (dopamine, DA, serotonin, 5-HT) in PFC is far from been revealed. As an example, despite the use of atypical antipsychotics targeting both dopamine and serotonin, improvement in social symptoms in schizophrenic patients remains limited. Understanding the role of the interaction between Ach and monoamines, and how its alteration might sustain social deficits represents a major challenge. I will thus describe previous work in mouse using monoamine local pharmacology and optogenetic modulation of Ach release in PFC. These results show that of Ach and monoamine modulates decision to interact in adapted way, and I will discuss about possible impact on Excitation/Inhibition balance in PFC. Moreover, I will also describe how this modulation might trigger a change in emotional/affective stimuli broadcasted by animal. Our results advocate for taking more precise measures about what affective cue are shared by animals during interaction to better understand role of these neuromodulations during social cognition. I will thus describe our projects in term of behaviour and brain imaging to tackle this interaction between those neuromodulators in PFC, and its impact on social cognition.