Representations of social experience in hippocampal circuits

For most mammals, the ability to form, maintain, retrieve, and reshape memories of social experience is essential for individual survival and cooperative behavior. Considerable recent progress has been made in understanding how the hippocampus forms internal representations of social experience, with the CA2 region having emerged as an important integrator of multiple socially relevant inputs. In this review, we discuss recent studies exploring neural substrates of social recognition with a focus on the potential role of plasticity mechanisms in hippocampal circuits and their downstream targets. We also consider the neural bases of binding social with nonsocial and abstract features of the environment to create multidimensional representations that support adaptive social behavior.