Neural circuits for mammalian parental behaviour.

Parental caregiving circuits in mammals are highly plastic and context dependent, dynamically reshaped by internal state and social experience across timescales from hours to weeks.

• Why it matters: Infant-directed behaviours vary widely, even within the same individual, and it remains unclear how neural circuits maintain robustness while allowing flexibility in caregiving.
• What they did: The review synthesizes circuit-level findings from rodent models and compares them with parental diversity across mammals, focusing on how state and social experience reshape circuits over hours to weeks.
• The result: The evidence suggests parental circuits adapt their function to produce life stage-appropriate behavioural outputs, supporting parental behaviour as a model for reconfiguring neural circuits under changing demands.

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