Research demonstrates enhanced hippocampal oscillations and neuron responses to pair-bonded partners in prairie voles, suggesting a unique encoding mechanism.
Neural representation of specific opposite-sex partners remains largely unexplored. Using monogamous prairie voles, we demonstrated that partner preference required the ventral hippocampus, in which 3-4 Hz oscillations were enhanced following partner interaction. We identified ventral hippocampal neurons responding selectively to the pair-bonded partner and stranger, which encoded identity-related information in a nonlinear manner, shedding light upon how mammalian brains create distinct neural representations of romantic opposite-sex partners.
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Jiayan et al. (2025) studied this question.
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