Figure 6. Estrogen influences the development of sexually dimorphic MeA responses.
(A) Population summary of MeA responses to male, female, and predator stimuli recorded from adult untreated female mice (red squares) or estrogen treated adult females (dark red triangles). (B) Sex-specificity histograms for units recorded from estrogen-treated adult females (dark red fill), adult untreated females (red; no fill), and untreated adult males (blue; no fill) for comparison. Estrogen treatment reduced responses in adult female mice to male stimuli (leftward) and increased the frequency of responses to same-sex stimuli (rightward). Horizontal lines indicate the bootstrapped 95% confidence interval for the mean of each distribution. (C) Comparison of the dorsal-ventral locations of male vs predator responsive units (blue) and female vs predator responsive units (red; see Figure 2—figure supplement 1) in the MeA of estrogen treated females. Both male responsive and female responsive units are dorsal to predator responsive units.