Mechanisms of cognitive and social circuit maturation relevant to mental disorders

Our laboratory uses rat and marmoset models to identify the mechanisms that regulate the maturation neural circuits in control of cognitive and social behavior. We are particularly interested in how our sense of "Self" is mechanistically established through the gene and environmental interaction across developmental critical periods. Specifically, we study how early social experience shapes 1) the boundary between self and others (social distance), 2) self-awareness (meta cognition) by combining state-of-art techaniques to measure and manipulate speicfic neural circuit with machine learning-based behavioral analysis in behavring animals.