Animal Behavior and Cognition

Individuality transfer: Predicting human decision-making across tasks

1. Hiroshi Higashi

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study presents a useful framework to extract the individuality index to predict subjects' behavior in the target tasks. However, the evidence supporting such a framework is somewhat incomplete and would benefit from overall framing and clarity on its approaches. Overall, this study would be of interest to cognitive and AI researchers who work on cognitive models in general.

Reviewed by eLife

Risk-taking incentives predict aggression heuristics in female gorillas

1. Nikolaos Smit
2. Martha M Robbins

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study uses long-term behavioural observations to understand the factors that influence female-on-female aggression in gorilla social groups. The evidence supporting the claims is convincing, as it includes novel methods of assessing aggression and considers other potential factors. The work will be of interest to broad biologists working on the social interactions of animals.

Reviewed by eLife

Glia-mediated gut-brain cytokine signaling couples sleep to intestinal inflammation

1. Alina Malita
2. Anne H Skakkebaek
3. Olga Kubrak
4. Xiaokang Chen
5. Takashi Koyama
6. Elizabeth C Connolly
7. Nadja Ahrentløv
8. Ditte S Andersen
9. Michael J Texada
10. Kenneth V Halberg
11. Kim Rewitz

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important work by Malita et al. describes a mechanism by which an intestinal infection causes an increase in daytime sleep through signaling from the gut to the blood-brain barrier. Their findings suggest that cytokines upd3 and upd2 produced by the intestine following infection act on glia of the blood brain barrier to regulate sleep by modulating Allatostatin A signaling. The evidence is compelling and elegantly performed using the ample Drosophila genetic toolbox, making this work appealing for a broad group of neuroscience researchers interested in sleep and gut-brain interactions.

Reviewed by eLife

Integration of parallel pathways for flight control in a hawkmoth reflects prevalence and relevance of natural visual cues

1. Ronja Bigge
2. Rebecca Grittner
3. Anna Stöckl

• Curated by eLife

  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. These findings will be of broad interest to enthusiasts of visual neuroscience and flight behavior.

Reviewed by eLife

Identification of the trail-following pheromone receptor in termites

1. Souleymane Diallo
2. Kateřina Kašparová
3. Josef Šulc
4. Jibin Johny
5. Jan Křivánek
6. Jana Nebesářová
7. David Sillam-Dussès
8. Pavlína Kyjaková
9. Jiří Vondrášek
10. Aleš Machara
11. Ondřej Lukšan
12. Ewald Grosse-Wilde
13. Robert Hanus

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important work by Diallo et al. substantially advances our understanding of the chemosensory system of a non-hymenopteran eusocial insect by identifying the first olfactory receptor for the trail pheromone in termites. The evidence supporting the conclusions that the receptor PsimOR14 is very narrowly tuned for the pheromone neocembrene is compelling. The work will be of broad interest to entomologists, chemical ecologists, neuroscientists, and molecular biologists.

Reviewed by eLife

Acquisition of auditory discrimination mediated by different processes through two distinct circuits linked to the lateral striatum

1. Susumu Setogawa
2. Takashi Okauchi
3. Di Hu
4. Yasuhiro Wada
5. Keigo Hikishima
6. Hirotaka Onoe
7. Kayo Nishizawa
8. Nobuyuki Sakayori
9. Hiroyuki Miyawaki
10. Takuma Kitanishi
11. Kenji Mizuseki
12. Yilong Cui
13. Kazuto Kobayashi

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study provides an important understanding of the contribution of different striatal subregions, the anterior Dorsal Lateral Striatum (aDLS) and the posterior Ventrolateral Striatum (pVLS), to auditory discrimination learning. The authors have included robust behavior combined with multiple observational and perturbation techniques. The data provided are convincing of the relevance of task-related activity in these two subregions during learning.

Reviewed by eLife

Homosensory and heterosensory dishabituation engage distinct circuits in Drosophila

1. Alexandros Charonitakis
2. Sofia Pasadaki
3. Eirini-Maria Georganta
4. Kyriaki Foka
5. Ourania Semelidou
6. Efthimios MC Skoulakis

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study provides important findings on the neural circuits underlying dishabituation of the olfactory avoidance response in Drosophila. The data as presented provide solid evidence that the dishabituation involves distinct pathways from habituation. They show that reward-activated dopaminergic neurons provide input for within-modal dishabituation, while punishment-activated dopaminergic neurons provide input for cross-modal dishabituation. The work will interest neuroscientists, particularly behavioral neuroscientists working on habituation, neural circuits, and the dopaminergic system.

Reviewed by eLife

Hatching with Numbers: Pre-natal Light Exposure Affects Number Sense and the Mental Number Line in young domestic chicks

1. Rosa Rugani
2. Matteo Macchinizzi
3. Yujia Zhang
4. Lucia Regolin

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This fundamental study demonstrates how a left-right bias in the relationship between numerical magnitude and space depends on brain lateralization. The evidence is compelling, and the manuscript could be strengthened by improving its contextualization, presentation, and discussion. The results will be of interest to researchers studying numerical cognition, brain lateralization, and cognitive brain development more broadly.

Reviewed by eLife

Old age variably impacts chimpanzee engagement and efficiency in stone tool use

1. Elliot Howard-Spink
2. Tetsuro Matsuzawa
3. Susana Carvalho
4. Catherine Hobaiter
5. Katarina Almeida-Warren
6. Thibaud Gruber
7. Dora Biro

• Curated by eLife

  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. The methods and results are robust providing solid evidence of the effects of old age on nut cracking behaviour at this field site. Despite the low sample size of five individuals, this study is of broad interest to ethologists, primatologists, archaeologists, and psychologists.

Reviewed by eLife

Bees flexibly adjust decision strategies to information content in a foraging task

1. Johannes Spaethe
2. Selma Hutzenthaler
3. Alexander Dietz
4. Karl Gehrig
5. James Foster
6. Anna Stöckl

Reviewed by preLights