Mice raised in a stimulus-rich environment show less complexity in their social interactions than those reared in less-cluttered environments. That’s according to a study from researchers at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, published earlier this month (September 2) in eLife.
To investigate high-order social interactions among mice, Elad Schneidman and his colleagues created an automatic system based on the idea of maximum entropy models from physics to track individuals within 17 small groups if mice over time. “We have found that the minimal models that rely only on individual traits and pairwise correlations between animals are not enough to capture group behavior, but that models that include third-order interactions”—the next step above pairwise dependencies for a given model—“give a very accurate description of the group,” Schneidman and his coauthors wrote in their paper.
Overall, the researchers found that mice raised in a complex and more populated environment spent significantly more time inside the large nest, compared with those reared in standard laboratory conditions, which spent more time outside of it. “Social interactions and correlated group behavior depend on past environment,” the researchers concluded.
