Animal Behavior and Cognition

iMOUSE - Reforming the Strategy of Refinement and Reduction for indispensable laboratory animal-based studies in translational research

1. Maciej Łaz
2. Mirko Lampe
3. Isaac Connor
4. Dmytro Shestachuk
5. Marcel Ludwig
6. Ursula Müller
7. Oliver F. Strauch
8. Nadine Suendermann
9. Stefan Lüth
10. Janine Kah

Reviewed by Arcadia Science

Emergent periodicity in the collective synchronous flashing of fireflies

1. Raphael Sarfati
2. Kunaal Joshi
3. Owen Martin
4. Julie C Hayes
5. Srividya Iyer-Biswas
6. Orit Peleg

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This important study provides a quantitative characterization and understanding of firing collective patterns in P. Carolinus fireflies. The work significantly contributes to fill the gap between observations and mechanistic models, with convincing experimental evidence and solid theoretical modeling. This work will be of interest to readers curious about collective behavior, biological rhythms, and models of synchronized oscillations.

Reviewed by eLife

Wandering albatrosses exert high take-off effort only when both wind and waves are gentle

1. Leo Uesaka
2. Yusuke Goto
3. Masaru Naruoka
4. Henri Weimerskirch
5. Katsufumi Sato
6. Kentaro Q Sakamoto

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This fundamental study advances our understanding of seabird responses to environmental conditions, with implications for movement ecology, flight biomechanics, animal foraging, and bio-energetics. Animal-borne data-loggers are used to generate a compelling high quality dataset on animal movement and environmental conditions. The study will interest ornithologists, comparative bio-mechanists, ocean ecologists and those interested in technological advances in animal sensors.

Reviewed by eLife

Independence and synergy of spatial attention in the two visual systems of jumping spiders

1. Maria Loconsole
2. Federico Ferrante
3. Davide Giacomazzi
4. Massimo De Agrò

Reviewed by Arcadia Science

An 8-cage imaging system for automated analyses of mouse behavior

1. Thaís Del Rosario Hernández
2. Narendra R. Joshi
3. Sayali V. Gore
4. Jill A. Kreiling
5. Robbert Creton

Reviewed by Arcadia Science

Automated scoring of nematode nictation on a textured background

1. Patrick D. McClanahan
2. Luca Golinelli
3. Tuan Anh Le
4. Liesbet Temmerman

Reviewed by Arcadia Science

Anemonefish have finer color discrimination in the ultraviolet

1. Laurie J. Mitchell
2. Amelia Phelan
3. Fabio Cortesi
4. N. Justin Marshall
5. Wen-sung Chung
6. Daniel C. Osorio
7. Karen L. Cheney

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This paper studies color vision in anemonefish. The central conclusion of the paper is that anemonefish use signals from their UV cones to discriminate colors that would not otherwise be distinguishable; this differs from other fish in which UV cones extend the range of wavelengths of sensitivity but do not add a dimension to color vision. The work fits into a rich history of studies investigating how color vision fits into an animal's ecological niche. At the same time, the manuscript needs to more clearly establish and convey the degree to which each conclusion is supported by the data and where the limits of certainty lie.

Reviewed by eLife

Inferring sources of suboptimality in perceptual decision making using a causal inference task

1. Sabyasachi Shivkumar
2. Madeline S. Cappelloni
3. Ross K. Maddox
4. Ralf M. Haefner

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study of human perceptual decision-making provides important insights into the sources of suboptimality in human inference. The authors provide solid evidence by combining psychophysics in an audiovisual causal inference task with detailed modeling of the observed behavior. Additional control analyses should be carried out to validate the identifiability of distinct suboptimalities using the authors' modeling framework, and the generalizability of their findings in other conditions should be tested or discussed more explicitly.

Reviewed by eLife

Continuous, long-term crawling behavior characterized by a robotic transport system

1. James Yu
2. Stephanie Dancausse
3. Maria Paz
4. Tolu Faderin
5. Melissa Gaviria
6. Joseph W Shomar
7. Dave Zucker
8. Vivek Venkatachalam
9. Mason Klein

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study describes a useful method to monitor the behavior of Drosophila larvae in a uniform environment over much longer time scales than was possible with previous methods. The authors provide a solid characterization of aspects of the method and show that the behavior of single larvae can be quantified over several hours. The experiments offer a proof-of-concept for a robotic device that will enable the investigation of behavior in long-term experiments in ways that were previously unimaginable.

Reviewed by eLife

Age-related differences in prefrontal glutamate are associated with increased working memory decay that gives the appearance of learning deficits

1. Milena Rmus
2. Mingjian He
3. Beth Baribault
4. Edward G Walsh
5. Elena K Festa
6. Anne GE Collins
7. Matthew R Nassar

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This important study combines behavior, computational modelling and magnetic resonance spectroscopy to address the question whether age-related declines in learning are driven by declines in working memory or deficiencies of the RL system. The general approach is solid, but the presented evidence to support the papers' main claims could be stronger. With additional analyses and adaptation of the main claims, the paper could be of high interest for researchers in the field of cognitive aging and decision making.

Reviewed by eLife