Asymmetric prefrontal representations for leader-follower dynamics.

Medial prefrontal cortex activity encodes leader-follower roles and influences cooperative decision-making in mice, with distinct neural representations for each role.

• Why it matters: Understanding how social roles like leader and follower are represented in the brain is crucial for deciphering the neural basis of cooperation and social behavior across species.
• What they did: The study used a mouse paradigm with reciprocal interactions to observe role emergence, combined with calcium imaging and a multi-agent inverse reinforcement learning model to analyze neural activity and decision-making.
• The result: Findings show that mPFC activity encodes social role dynamics and partner information, enabling the decoding of latent value functions that guide cooperation and influence joint decisions.