We use molecular, genetic, and physiologic approaches in prairie voles and other species. Some of the questions that we are trying to tackle are:
- How do animals recognize, remember, and respond differently to specific individuals based on their past experience to build and maintain enduring relationships?
- How do the neural circuits that underlie social attachment develop?
- How do these circuits operate at different times in an animal’s life to regulate social behaviors?
- How do early experience or mutations in genes associated with psychiatric illnesses alter these circuits to change social attachment behaviors?
- How do genomic differences between species control development to influence social behaviors?