Humans often take actions to assist others experiencing unresponsiveness, such as transient loss ofand fig. S1) and female helper animals (Fig. 1Qconsciousness. How other animals react to unresponsive conspecifics—and the neural mechanismsand fig. S2), with comparable amounts in bothdriving such behaviors—remain largely unexplored. In this study, we demonstrated that mice exhibitgroups (Fig. 1, R to T). By contrast, the totalrescue-like social behaviors toward unresponsive conspecifics, characterized by intense physical contactduration of social investigation toward awakeand grooming directed at the recipient’s facial and mouth areas, which expedite their recovery fromand unresponsive partners was comparableunresponsiveness. We identified the medial amygdala (MeA) as a key region that encodes the(Fig. 1G and fig. S2B). We performed furtherunresponsive state of others and drives this head-directed physical contact. Notably, the behavioralanalysis to identify the body parts of the recipresponses toward unresponsive conspecifics differed from those directed at awake, stressed individuals,ient that were most frequently groomed by theand these responses were differentially represented in the MeA. These findings shed light on the neuralhelpers and found that the trunk (particularlymechanisms underlying prosocial responses toward unresponsive individuals.

2025-03-25