My research at the Sweis lab at Mount Sinai investigates social hierarchy(power and affiliation) with temporal costs to guide decision-making in a novel social foraging task. By analyzing behavior in the On-Shot SNRow paradigm, it aims to reveal how direct social interaction and waiting costs dynamically shape adaptive social preferences and choices.
Social decision-making shapes how animals, including humans, form and maintain relationships by requiring individuals to balance social motivation against costs such as time and effort. Understanding how these choices are made helps reveal the mechanisms that guide social behavior across species. The One-Shot Social Navigation Row is a novel paradigm that combines ideas from the Schiller Lab’s work on human social decision-making and the Sweis Lab’s work on decision-making in mice. This task is designed to measure how social preferences change when mice have direct interaction instead of interaction through a mesh barrier. By combining these approaches, the paradigm allows examination of both social motivation and decision-making behavior in a controlled setting. This project investigates how direct social interaction influences partner choice and waiting behavior in mice. Specifically, the analysis evaluates how access to direct interaction alters preferences, decision consistency, and the influence of established social hierarchy, or dominance rank, in the novel One-Shot paradigm. During the procedure, mice completed three back-to-back trials in a One-Shot maze, where they had up to 20 minutes to enter a waiting zone and remain for 15 seconds. If the full 15 seconds were completed, 5 minutes of direct interaction with the chosen partner was earned. Although analysis is still ongoing, preliminary data reveal distinct patterns. Most notably, that Intermediate mice were overwhelmingly chosen as partners across all trials. Furthermore, mice consistently selected the same partner in two out of three trials. Females demonstrated higher consistency in partner choices than males. Future work will investigate the underlying reasons for these preferences, including the impact of dominance rank.
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