Animal Behavior and Cognition

eLife Assessment

This valuable study provides a novel framework for leveraging longitudinal field observations to examine the effects of aging on stone tool use behaviour in wild chimpanzees. However, the analysis and interpretation are currently incomplete and would benefit from a more robust consideration of additional sources of variance for the data (e.g., foraging ecology, nut and tool properties, etc.). Despite the low sample size of five individuals, this study is of broad interest to ethologists, primatologists, archaeologists, and psychologists.

eLife Assessment

This manuscript describes a novel approach for assessing cognitive function in freely moving mice in their home-cage, without human involvement. The authors provide convincing evidence in support of the tasks they developed to capture a variety of complex behaviors and demonstrate the utility of a machine learning approach to expedite the acquisition of task demands. This work is important given its potential utility for other investigators interested in studying mouse cognition. However, additional information (e.g., detailed construction manual, code) is needed to allow other investigators to implement this system independently and use it widely.

eLife Assessment

This useful study presents a virtual reality-based contextual fear conditioning paradigm for head-fixed mice. The approach provides a way to perform multiphoton imaging of neural circuits during behaviors that have traditionally been studied in freely moving animals. However, evidence supporting key claims is currently incomplete, particularly regarding elicitation and detection of freezing behaviors, and the impact of the study would be increased by articulating what this initial exploration of parameters offers over existing approaches.

eLife Assessment

This important body of work uses state-of-the-art quantitative methods to characterize and compare behaviors across five different fish species to understand which features are conserved and which ones are differentiated. The convincing results from this study will be of interest to ethologists and also have potential utility in understanding the neural mechanisms leading to these behaviors.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study tests a methodology for the discovery of new honey bee-repellent odorants via machine learning. The conclusions of the study are supported by solid evidence, with predicted compounds validated in the lab and the field. This work will be of interest to researchers in ecology, pest control and olfactory neuroscience.

eLife Assessment

This important study investigates how hummingbird hawkmoths integrate stimuli from across their visual field to guide flight behavior. Cue conflict experiments provide solid evidence for an integration hierarchy within the visual field: hawkmoths prioritize the avoidance of dorsal visual stimuli, potentially to avoid crashing into foliage, while they use ventrolateral optic flow to guide flight control. With a more systematic quantification of specific parameter combinations, this paper would be of broad interest to enthusiasts of visual neuroscience and ethology.

eLife Assessment

The work presented in this paper provides an important insight into how early life experience shapes adult behavior in fruit bats. The authors raised juvenile bats either in an impoverished or enriched environment and studied their foraging behaviors. The evidence is convincing that bats raised in enriched environments are more active, bold, and exploratory, although further exploration of the data and clarification of the analysis would strengthened the evidence. The work will be of interest to ethologists and developmental psychologists.

eLife Assessment

The authors provide solid evidence that the likelihood of looking behaviour is predicted by the expected information gain, hence constituting a valuable formal model and explanation of habituation. Such modelling can represent crucial advances in explanation, over-and-above less specified models that can be fitted post hoc to any empirical pattern, although contrast testing with other accounts are desired. The findings would be of interest to researchers studying cognitive development.

eLife Assessment

This study reveals that female moths utilize ultrasonic sounds emitted by dehydrated plants to inform their oviposition decisions, highlighting sound as a potential sensory cue for optimal host plant selection. By investigating this novel acoustic interaction, the research adds an important piece to our understanding of plant-insect interactions. While the authors employed an overall solid experimental approach, weaknesses include the lack of raw data and individual data point visualization, inconsistencies in moth responses to sound cues with and without plants, and the use of a click frequency higher than what plants typically produce, which may limit the ecological applicability and broader generalization of the findings.

eLife Assessment

This work provides important findings characterizing potential synaptic mechanisms supporting the role of midline thalamus-hippocampal projections in fear memory extinction in mice. The methods and approaches were considered solid, though some evidence is incomplete as there are some concerns with the analytical approaches used for some aspects of the study. This work will be of interest to those in the field of thalamic regulation and fear memory.