Estrogen remodels large-scale cortical dynamics to promote behavioral persistence

High estrogen in female mice increases behavioral and neural persistence, with medial prefrontal cortex estrogen receptor alpha required for male-directed social preference and persistence.

• Why it matters: Slow sex-steroid remodeling is linked to adaptive behavior, but how it reshapes moment-to-moment cortical computations in social decision circuits is unclear.
• What they did: Using longitudinal high-density cortical recordings, quantitative behavioral phenotyping, and estrogen-receptor manipulation across low versus high estrogen states, they tested estrogen receptor alpha knockdown in mPFC and analyzed neural state dynamics, single-neuron properties, and resting-state connectivity.
• The result: High estrogen produced more persistent, behavior-aligned neural states with higher state discriminability and compressed within-state dimensionality, increased tuning selectivity and intrinsic timescales, stabilized social representations across days, strengthened similarly tuned recurrent connectivity, and mean-field modeling reproduced the persistence changes.

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