ArticleeNeuro
Social Isolation in Adolescence Disrupts Cortical Development and Goal-Dependent Decision-Making in Adulthood, Despite Social Reintegration.
Article in eNeuro. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 38 papers.
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Who cites it
38 citing papers in PubMed, 55 citations in OpenAlex.
- Post-weaning social isolation increases reward-seeking behavior in mice.Physiology & behavior · 2026Article
- Neuromodulators of orbitofrontal cortex function: A review of endocannabinoid, neurotrophin, and cell adhesion systems.Neurobiology of disease · 2026Review
- Traumatic stress recruits an excitatory orbitofrontal-amygdala pathway to drive maladaptive aggression.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Article
- Oligodendrocyte Egr2 Mediates the Beneficial Effect of Resocialization on the Social Ability of Socially Isolated Mice.Neuroscience bulletin · 2026Article
- Population-level encoding of task information is stronger in the adolescent compared to adult frontal cortex.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Development of visual-stimulus reversal learning-memory in mice is dependent on social interaction.iScience · 2026Article
- The role of sensory experience in the maturation of prefrontal cortical circuits.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2026Review
- Parallel neuronal structural plasticity with memory trace formation in the orbitofrontal cortex.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Action inflexibility and compulsive-like behavior accompany neurobiological alterations in the anterior orbitofrontal cortex and associated striatal nuclei.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Social isolation during adolescence differentially affects spatial learning in adult male and female mice.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- A dual-pathway architecture enables chronic stress to disrupt agency and promote habit formation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Social experience in adolescence shapes prefrontal cortex structure and function in adulthood.Molecular psychiatry · 2024Article
- Revisiting adolescence as a sensitive period for sociocultural processing.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2024Review
- Article
- A molecularly defined orbitofrontal cortical neuron population controls compulsive-like behavior, but not inflexible choice or habit.Progress in neurobiology · 2024Article
- Social Categorisation and Social Identification: The Mediating Role of Social Isolation and Loneliness in Adolescents Living with HIV.International journal of behavioral medicine · 2024Article
- Short- and Long-Term High-Fat Diet Exposure Differentially Alters Phasic and Tonic GABAergic Signaling onto Lateral Orbitofrontal Pyramidal Neurons.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Sexual differentiation of neural mechanisms of stress sensitivity during puberty.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Subunit-selective PI3-kinase control of action strategies in the medial prefrontal cortex.Neurobiology of learning and memory · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
The social environment influences neurodevelopment. Investigations using rodents to study this phenomenon commonly isolate subjects, then assess neurobehavioral consequences while animals are still isolated. This approach precludes one from dissociating the effects of on-going versus prior isolation, hindering our complete understanding of the consequences of social experience during particular developmental periods. Here, we socially isolated adolescent mice from postnatal day (P)31 to P60, then re-housed them into social groups. We tested their ability to select actions based on expected outcomes using multiple reinforcer devaluation and instrumental contingency degradation techniques. Social isolation in adolescence (but not adulthood) weakened instrumental response updating, causing mice to defer to habit-like behaviors. Habit biases were associated with glucocorticoid insufficiency in adolescence, oligodendrocyte marker loss throughout cortico-striatal regions, and dendritic spine and synaptic marker excess in the adult orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). Artificial, chemogenetic stimulation of the ventrolateral OFC in typical, healthy mice recapitulated response biases following isolation, causing habit-like behaviors. Meanwhile, correcting dendritic architecture by inhibiting the cytoskeletal regulatory protein ROCK remedied instrumental response updating defects in socially isolated mice. Our findings suggest that adolescence is a critical period during which social experience optimizes one's ability to seek and attain goals later in life. Age-typical dendritic spine elimination appears to be an essential factor, and in its absence, organisms may defer to habit-based behaviors.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.