Cortical regulation of collective social dynamics during environmental challenge

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 18 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02224-0

Raam, Li, Gu and colleagues identify neural mechanisms underlying group huddling in mice during cold exposure. They find that the prefrontal cortex encodes decisions to huddle and that silencing neural activity in some animals causes partners to compensate in response.