Lyle Kingsbury Ph.D.

Neural mechanisms of social interaction

Human beings are social animals. Our lives are profoundly shaped by our interactions with others, whether with our close friends and family, with our communities, or through our political institutions. This social nature is deeply rooted in our biology, and it is something that we share with most other species in the animal kingdom, from monkeys and rodents to fish and insects. ​I want to know what in the brain makes us social. What are the neural systems that allow us to interact with each other, to collaborate, cooperate and compete - and how do these systems work? During my graduate training in the Hong lab at UCLA, I used behavioral studies in mice combined with optical recordings and statistical modeling to explore how the brain encodes social information and shapes behavioral choices. Using simultaneous neural recordings from multiple animals, I also investigated how neural activity is coordinated across individuals, and how inter-brain neural dynamics are related to the evolution of social interactions.

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Reward learning for naturalistic decisions

Humans and other animals routinely make difficult decisions that depend on reference to a rich history of experiences in the world. In modern society, we are constantly calibrating how to best spend our limited time to support ourselves and achieve our personal goals. In the wild, animals also work with limited resources as well as threats to their survival, and are faced with the challenge of how to use their experience to make critical life decisions: Where and how should I look for food? What are the threats in my environment and when is it safe to explore? Is this other animal a friend, a threat, or a potential competitor? Making these kinds of decisions is arguably what the brain evolved to do - but how? How does the brain track information from experiences in rich, natural environments and use it to shape the decisions that are critical to an individual's success and survival? As a postdoctoral researcher in the Uchida lab at Harvard, I am exploring these questions in the mouse using electrical recordings of brain activity during reward learning and naturalistic foraging behavior.