Hu et al. show that the posterodorsal medial amygdala selectively controls social-reward seeking through its intersection with canonical dopaminergic reward circuits. To identify this circuitry, the authors developed an elegant new affiliative social operant procedure that separates social interaction from social-reward seeking.
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Szelenyi, E.R., Goodwin, N.L. & Golden, S.A. Social mice seeking circuits. Nat Neurosci 24, 761–762 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-021-00861-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-021-00861-1