Animal Behavior and Cognition

eLife assessment

This important paper advances our ability to understand feeding behavior in fruit flies and begins to address the challenging question of motivation. With innovative methods based on the detailed monitoring of interactions between foods of different qualities at different hunger states, they present compelling evidence for non-homeostatic feeding not driven by metabolic need.

eLife assessment

This valuable manuscript describes a fully automated touchscreen cognitive testing system for rats that reduces the length of training required to learn a task and eliminates the need for daily handling. These features make it possible to assess cognitive behaviors in conjunction with other neurobehavioral paradigms during adolescence, an important advance in the field. The data convincingly show that cognitive flexibility does not promote susceptibility to severe weight loss in the activity-based anorexia (ABA) paradigm. However, support for the claim that cognitive deficits seen in rats that had been exposed ABA adequately capture an important clinical feature of the pathophysiology of anorexia nervosa is incompletely supported.

eLife assessment

It is well established that valuation and value-based decision making is context-dependent, but the exact form of normalization has remained an open question. This study provides compelling evidence that values during reward learning are normalized based on the range of available values. These findings will be important for researchers interested in reward learning and decision-making.

eLife assessment:

This article reports the fundamental discovery that interfering with the function of the tyramine receptor causes a rapid decline in responses to olfactory stimuli in the honey bee. While tyramine signaling might specifically control the process of latent inhibition without affecting appetitive conditioning, the present analysis is incomplete in terms of ruling out the possibility that tyramine affects other functions of the antennal lobe. Nonetheless, compelling data highlight the role of one of the most highly expressed biogenic amine receptors in the insect olfactory system.

eLife assessment

This study presents important findings on the hunting strategies and energy intake of a bat in the wild. It combines several methods (biologging, captive experiment, and DNA metabarcoding) to provide convincing evidence for the claims. While relevant for researchers in the broad field of animal ecology, in its the current form, the significance of the results may be hard to appreciate for a general audience.

eLife assessment

This fundamental study substantially advances our understanding of interactions of consecutive memory tasks by identifying responsible molecules and neurons. The evidence supporting the claims of the authors is generally solid, although further contextualization of the interferences in memory consolidation and more rigorous measurements of the effects of genetic manipulation would have strengthened the study. The work will be of broad interest to neuroscientists working on learning and memory as well as learning psychologists.

eLife assessment

Why do fish school together? Energetic benefits have long been considered a key factor in motivating fish to swim together and tune their tail beat to exploit the whirling wake generated by conspecifics. This study clearly demonstrates that fish benefit from swimming in a two-dimensional vortical wake by locating their body in the vortical low-pressure zones that passively impart a net thrust force on their oscillating bodies. The behavioral and biofluid mechanical findings will interest comparative biomechanists, movement ecologists, evolutionary biologists, fluid mechanists, and bioinspired roboticists.

eLife assessment

This study is of relevance to the field of collective animal behavior. The proposed crop-cue-based motion-switching rules provide a welcome alternative to other models that assume far more deliberative abilities of ants, and it will be valuable to add this example to the collective motion and collective decision-making literature. There were several major issues that need addressing, including: overly simplistic models, no connection to similar phenomena in motion ecology and statistical mechanics, potential deficiences in the stochastic modeling approach, as well as some confusing terms and curious citations of the literature.

eLife assessment

This paper addresses the long-standing problem of color categorization and the forces that bring it about, which can be potentially interesting to researchers in cognition, visual neuroscience, society, and culture. In particular, the authors show that as a "model organism", a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) trained with the human-labelled image dataset ImageNet for object recognition can represent color categories. The finding reveals important features of deep neural networks in color processing and can also guide future theoretical and empirical work in high-level color vision.

eLife assessment

This is an important and timely characterization of a diversity of behaviors male and female rats exhibit during the acquisition of Pavlovian fear conditioning in a conditioned suppression procedure. The data are compelling and provide an exhaustive analysis of behavior in a complex associative learning paradigm that blends aversive Pavlovian and appetitive instrumental elements. The generalizability of these findings to other paradigms could be enhanced, however, with the inclusion of tests of cue responses in a neutral environment. These findings are likely to be of interest to those who study fear conditioning and associative learning more broadly in rodents.