SEXUAL-DIMORPHISM IN VISUALLY GUIDED APPROACH BEHAVIOR EMERGES UNIQUELY DURING ADOLESCENCE

Studying prey capture behavior in mice offers a fruitful platform for understanding how ecologically relevant visual stimuli are differentially processed by the brain throughout life. For example, specific visual stimuli that indicate prey and that naturally draw appetitive orienting in the adult may be interpreted differently or evoke distinct behaviors during development. What are the neural mechanisms that might allow an animal to flexibly couple the same stimulus information to distinct behavioral outcomes as a function of developmental needs? To begin to address this important question, we quantified visually evoked orienting behaviors between adolescent and adult C57BL6/J mice of both sexes under the natural prey capture context compared to responses in our established virtual motion stimulus paradigm, C-SPOT. Most surprisingly, we discovered that female versus male adolescent mice have opposing innate behavioral biases evoked by the same sweeping motion stimuli which is not present in adulthood. Further, female mice display a robust enhancement of approach towards visual motion over all other groups tested, yet they are the least aggressive in response to live prey. Thus, our work overall revealed that innate approach towards visual motion is robustly dissociated from predatory aggression in female versus male mice specifically during adolescence. This underscores the different natural behavioral goals and physiological states that uniquely apply to female versus male adolescent animals, and reveals that approach towards visual motion is a key sensory-motor process selectively augmented during female adolescence.