Corresponding Author: Herbert Zheng Wu, PhD, Nash Family Department of Neuroscience and Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, and coauthors.
Bottom Line: When two mice team up to win a shared reward, they spontaneously settle into leader and follower roles. The prefrontal cortex keeps track of who is leading on each attempt and builds a social map of the partner's location from the animal's own point of view. Silencing this region disrupts the teamwork.
Results: Pairs of mice learned a cooperative game in which both had to reach the same reward zone at the same time. Without any predefined arrangement, one mouse reliably became the leader and the other the follower, and the sharper this division, the faster the pair learned. Leaders strongly influenced followers' choices, but followers also shaped leaders' decision-making. The roles were stable but flexible: a mouse retained its role with a new partner, and when two leaders were paired, one stepped back to follow. Brain recordings showed that the prefrontal cortex signals whether an animal is leading or following and encodes the partner's position relative to the animal's own body and heading, forming an egocentric social map. These "social receptive fields" are more robust in followers, consistent with their greater need to track the leader.
Why the Research Is Interesting: Leader-follower cooperation runs throughout social life, yet how the brain creates and maintains these roles has remained a black box. This work provides the first mouse model of leader-follower teamwork and links it to specific patterns of prefrontal cortex activity at the level of single cells. It reframes leadership not as one animal simply controlling another, but as an asymmetric yet bidirectional partnership. The team also created a new artificial intelligence method that reverse-engineers the hidden goals each animal pursues and showed that these inferred goals can be decoded directly from brain activity.
Who: Pairs of mice performing a cooperative foraging task, studied using brain recordings, targeted silencing of brain regions, and a new multi-agent AI model. The findings may help explain how the social brain works and what goes wrong in disorders that affect social behavior.
When: Mice were studied as they learned and mastered the cooperative task, with brain activity tracked across sessions.
What: The study examined how social roles emerge and remain stable, how the prefrontal cortex represents leading, following, and a partner's position, and what happens to teamwork when that region is switched off. A companion AI model inferred the values guiding each animal's choices.
How: Two mice shared an arena and had to arrive together at the same zone to earn water. Miniature microscopes recorded activity from hundreds of prefrontal neurons while the animals cooperated. Chemical and optogenetic tools briefly silenced the region in one or both animals to test its causal role. A new AI method called multi-agent inverse reinforcement learning worked backward from the animals' movements to estimate the goals driving their decisions, which were then compared with the recorded brain activity.
Study Conclusions: Leader and follower roles arise spontaneously through cooperation, rather than from a preexisting pecking order, and the prefrontal cortex is essential for maintaining them. Rather than storing a fixed map of space, this region builds a flexible, self-centered representation of the partner that shifts with the rules of the task and predicts when an animal will switch roles or make a mistake. Leadership emerges as an asymmetric but reciprocal partnership in which the follower carries a more robust representational load. The work demonstrates that AI-inferred internal goals guiding behavior align with brain activity and offers both a framework for studying the social brain and a blueprint for socially capable artificial intelligence.
Corresponding Author: Herbert Zheng Wu, PhD, Nash Family Department of Neuroscience and Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, and coauthors.
Paper Title: Asymmetric Prefrontal Representations for Leader-Follower Dynamics
Said Mount Sinai's Dr. Herbert Zheng Wu:
"Leadership is a partnership, not a one-way street. The leader usually sets the goal, but the follower is doing a surprising amount of the brain work, actively tracking the partner, holding the team together, and enabling success. In other words, leaders can only lead when followers choose to follow. What excites me most is that we could watch the prefrontal cortex build a personal social map of a partner, or a social receptive field, and that perturbing this brain region disrupts cooperation. These are the same brain circuits that falter in conditions like autism and schizophrenia, where reading and coordinating with others can be difficult. By pairing the biology with AI, we now find a new way to ask how the brain solves teamwork and how to build machines that may cooperate better."
