Plasticity — the brain’s ability to change connections — is central to forming reliable social memories. When neurons in hippocampal pathways strengthen or weaken their links, they can store complex combinations of who, where, and when. That binding of social and non-social features lets animals use past encounters to predict outcomes, form friendships, or avoid threats. Tracing these mechanisms gives clues about how social knowledge becomes flexible or rigid across development, aging, and disease.
If we can map the rules by which hippocampal networks encode social information, we can better imagine interventions that enhance learning, inclusion, and resilience. The pathways discussed in this review touch on questions about identity, group behavior, and adaptability. Follow the full article to see how these brain circuits might be harnessed to support human growth and more inclusive social environments.
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.