Mouse brain shows distinct prefrontal codes for leader and follower roles in cooperation

A cooperative foraging task was designed for mouse pairs, allowing leader and follower roles to develop spontaneously and predict learning speed. Chemogenetic and optogenetic silencing of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) disrupted coordination, with follower inactivation producing the strongest deficits. One-photon calcium imaging showed that mPFC neurons encoded whether the recorded mouse was leading or following and represented the partner’s position in egocentric coordinates, forming a role-dependent social value map.

A multi-agent inverse reinforcement learning framework extracted latent value functions that matched the neural population activity and explained decision-making. The findings demonstrate that asymmetric prefrontal representations underlie reciprocal influence in joint decisions, linking social role dynamics to neural coding.