Bidirectional cingulate-dependent danger information transfer across rats
Description
This is the data that relates to the figures in the Plos Biology manuscript Han, Bruls, Soyman et al., 2019, "Bidirectional cingulate-dependent danger information transfer across rats". See that manuscript for detail. The abstract of the paper is: "Social transmission of freezing has been conceived of as a one-way phenomenon in which an observer catches the fear of another. Here we use a paradigm in which an observer rat witnesses another receive electroshocks. Bayesian model comparison and Granger causality show rats exchange information about danger in both directions: how the observer reacts to the demonstrator’s distress also influences how the demonstrator responds to the danger. This was true to a similar extent across highly familiar and entirely unfamiliar rats, but is stronger in animals preexposed to shocks. Injecting muscimol in the anterior cingulate of observers reduced freezing in the observers and in the demonstrators receiving the shocks. Using simulations, we support the notion that the coupling of freezing across rats could be selected for to more efficiently detect dangers in a group, in a way similar to cross-species eavesdropping". The data is organized by figure, with the data necessary to recreate each figure contained in one zip file.