Experience-dependent mechanisms in the regulation of parental care.

Experience-dependent mechanisms in the regulation of parental care. Front Neuroendocrinol. 2019 Apr 19;: Authors: Stolzenberg DS, Mayer HS Abstract Maternal behavior is a defining characteristic of mammals, which is regulated by a core, conserved neural circuit. However, mothering behavior is not always a default response to infant conspecifics. For example, initial fearful, fragmented or aggressive responses toward infants in laboratory rats and mice can give way to highly motivated and organized caregiving behaviors following appropriate hormone exposure or repeated experience with infants. Therefore hormonal and/or experiential factors must be involved in gating infant access to central approach and avoidance neural systems. In this review we describe evidence supporting the idea that infant conspecifics are capable of activating distinct neural pathways to elicit avoidant, aggressive and parental responses from adult rodents and discuss the hypothesis that alterations in transcriptional regulation within the medial preoptic area of the hypothalamus may be a key mechanism of neural plasticity involved in programming the differential sensitivity of these neural pathways. PMID: 31009675 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology - Category: Endocrinology Authors: Tags: Front Neuroendocrinol Source Type: research