Social recognition is essential for the formation of social structures. Many times, recognition comes with lesser exploration of familiar animals. This lesser exploration has led to the assumption that recognition may be a habituation memory. The underlying memory mechanisms and the thereby acquired cortical representations of familiar mice have remained largely unknown, however. Here, we introduce an approach directly examining the recognition process from volatile body odors among male mice. We show that volatile body odors emitted by mice are sufficient to identify individuals and that more salience is assigned to familiar mice. Familiarity is encoded by reinforced population responses in two olfactory cortex hubs and communicated to other brain regions. The underlying oxytocin-induced plasticity promotes the separation of the cortical representations of familiar from other mice. In summary, neuronal encoding of familiar animals is distinct and utilizes the cortical representational space more broadly, promoting storage of complex social relationships.

社会认可对于社会结构的形成至关重要。很多时候，对熟悉动物的探索较少，就会获得认可。这种较少的探索导致了这样的假设：识别可能是一种习惯化记忆。然而，潜在的记忆机制以及由此获得的熟悉小鼠的皮质表征在很大程度上仍然未知。在这里，我们介绍了一种直接检查雄性小鼠挥发性体味识别过程的方法。我们证明，小鼠散发的挥发性体味足以识别个体，并且熟悉的小鼠更显着。熟悉感是由两个嗅觉皮层中枢的强化群体反应编码的，并传达到其他大脑区域。潜在的催产素诱导的可塑性促进了熟悉小鼠的皮质表征与其他小鼠的分离。总之，熟悉的动物的神经元编码是独特的，并且更广泛地利用皮质表征空间，促进复杂社会关系的存储。