Sex Differences in Rodent Neuronal Reactivity to Predatory and Non-predatory Natural Images in the Dentate Gyrus (2023)
Undergraduates: Megana Duraipandi, Fengjun Tian, Shivani Nagamalla, Wu Li, Quinn Mahone
Faculty Advisor: Rachel Penton
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience
The dentate gyrus (DG) is essential for hippocampal memory formation and visual perception. Sex hormones play a significant role during the development of the DG region, indicating that functional sex differences during visual processing may exist. Sex differences in predatory odor recognition have been identified in rodents, but the effects of visual predatory stimuli on the activity of the DG region have yet to be investigated. Neuronal reactivity, specifically mean firing rates of units, in mice DG regions during the presentation of predatory, non-predatory, and control natural images were analyzed using the Visual Coding dataset published by the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Statistically significant sex differences were found on the mean firing rates in the DG region. Specifically, male mice exhibited higher firing rates to predatory, non-predatory, and control images when compared with female mice. Further, there was a significant difference between mean firing rates among control and non-predatory animal image groups in female mice only. These findings suggest that there are neuronal sex differences in mice to natural visual stimuli. Future studies may warrant investigating other regions of the hippocampus and their role in visual predatory stimuli perception.
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