Adolescent rats extend help to outgroup members, highlighting a neural network for group identity categorization

Prosocial behavior, in particular helping others in need, occurs preferentially in response to the perceived distress of one’s own group members, or ingroup. The development of neural mechanisms underlying social selectivity towards ingroup members are not well established. Here, we used a rat helping behavior test to explore the development and neural basis of ingroup bias for prosocial behavior in adolescent rats. We previously found that adult rats selectively help others from their own social group, and that this selectivity is associated with activation in reward and motivation circuits. Surprisingly, we found that adolescent rats helped both ingroup and outgroup members, evidence suggesting that ingroup bias emerges in adulthood. Analysis of brain-wide neural activity, indexed by expression of the early-immediate gene c-Fos, revealed increased activity for ingroup members across a broad set of regions, which was congruent for adults and adolescents. However, adolescents showed reduced hippocampal and insular activity, and increased orbitofrontal cortex activity compared to adults. Adolescent rats who did not help trapped others also demonstrated increased amygdala connectivity. Together, these findings demonstrate that biases for group-dependent prosocial behavior develop with age in rats and suggest that specific brain regions contribute to this prosocial selectivity, overall pointing to possible targets for the functional modulation of ingroup bias. One Sentence Summary Prosocial selectivity increases with age in parallel with hippocampal and insular activation, providing insight into the neural classification of group membership.