Developing a Paradigm to Explore Helping Behaviour in Mice: Neural Mechanism of Prosocial Decision

Diplôme Master Developing a Paradigm to Explore Helping Behaviour in Mice: Neural Mechanism of Prosocial Decision eng 2025-06-04 author Wei Chung Hsu 416158 director Girard Benoît 0000-0002-3914-6483 909992 director Bellone Camilla 0000-0002-6774-6275 559161 Département de neurosciences fondamentales (NEUFO) Prosocial innate helping behaviors—voluntary actions that benefit others—have been observed across mammalian species, but their underlying neural substrates remain poorly characterized in mice, a key model organism for neurobiological investigation. Here, we introduce the DigiRescue paradigm, a novel experimental approach that leverages species-typical digging behavior to reveal and quantify helping responses in laboratory mice. In contrast to conventional paradigms that rely on trained behaviors or where specific and directed helping decision is unclear, our assay elicits spontaneous, untrained prosocial responses directed specifically toward distressed conspecifics. We demonstrate that mice preferentially dig to liberate a distress trapped conspecific over accessing an equally available freely moving social partner, providing strong evidence for targeted helping rather than general social approach. This preference emerged without training and persisted across spatial configurations, supporting a robust prosocial decision. Chemogenetic silencing of medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) abolished this directed helping without affecting general locomotion, revealing a causal role for prefrontal circuits in prosocial helping action selection. By combining ethological validity with precise behavioral quantification and neural circuit manipulation, our findings establish the DigiRescue paradigm as a powerful tool for investigating the biological basis of helping behavior and identify the mPFC as a critical node in the neural networks that enable one mouse to recognize and decision to help to another's distress. Dewey 616.8 Master of Neuroscience, Faculty of Medicine 53 Département de neurosciences fondamentales 21A false 973 Les dysfonctions synaptiques du cerveau 971 ea1ff5c6-6999-4998-bd9f-e6f2f0544c25 Master thesis Restricted Master_thesis_Wei_final.pdf 2472365 application/pdf 9e47b22b0368f8def7d176c287ea3c8c713d2e6bd7b34eb3c2cb378cf506d43d restrictedAccess Faculté de médecine / Section de médecine fondamentale / Département de neurosciences fondamentales

Title	Published in	Access level	OA Policy	Year	Views	Downloads

Developing a Paradigm to Explore Helping Behaviour in Mice: Neural Mechanism of Prosocial Decision				2025	33	0

Archive ouverte UNIGE

Wei Chung, Hsu