Fig. 5: Neurons activated by female odour encode food reward and female conspecifics.

a Schematic of behavioural paradigm for the presentation of unconditioned stimuli (US). b Representative calcium traces of neurons activated by each US in the schematic above. Shaded area indicates periods in stimulus context or foot-shock presentation. c–f Counts of neurons that were activated and not activated by unconditioned stimuli. Significance was tested by 2-sided Fisher’s exact test. c Counts of female odor-active, and non-active neurons between sucrose-active and sucrose non-active neurons: P = 0.0012, and between female-active and female non-active neurons: P = 0.0001. d Counts of female conspecific-active, and non-active neurons between sucrose-active and sucrose non-active neurons: P = 0.488. e Counts of female odor-active, and non-active neurons between fox odor-active and fox odor non-active neurons: P = 0.0002, and between shock-active and shock non-active neurons: P = 0.565. f Counts of fox odor-active, and non-active neurons between shock-active and shock non-active neurons: P = 0.452. g Matrix of Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient ρ (2-tailed) for the response activation to female-odor vs. sucrose: P = 0.0007, female-odor vs. female conspecific: P = 0.0001, female-odor vs. fox-odor: P = 0.0002, female conspecific vs. fox-odor: P = 0.0001. N = 411 neurons, 5 mice.