Animal Behavior and Cognition

eLife Assessment

This important study presents JABS, an open-source platform that integrates hardware and user-friendly software for standardized mouse behavioral phenotyping. The work has practical implications for improving reproducibility and accessibility in behavioral neuroscience, especially for linking behavior to genetics across diverse mouse strains. The strength of evidence is convincing, with validation of key platform components, although incomplete methodological details and limited documentation, particularly around pose estimation and classifier generalizability, currently limit its interpretability and broader adoption.

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.

eLife Assessment

This important study presents a new framework (ASBAR) that combines open-source toolboxes for pose estimation and behavior recognition to automate the process of categorizing behaviors in wild apes from video data. The authors present compelling evidence that this pipeline can categorize simple wild ape behaviors from out-of-context video at a similar level of accuracy as previous models, while simultaneously vastly reducing the size of the model. The study's results should be of particular interest to primatologists and other behavioral biologists working with natural populations.

eLife Assessment

This important work develops C. elegans as a model organism for studying effort-based discounting by asking the worms to choose between easy and hard to digest bacteria. The authors provide convincing evidence that the nematodes are effort-discounting. However, evidence regarding the role of dopamine is incomplete and this weakens the authors connection of the behavior in C. elegans with mammals.

eLife Assessment

This valuable work investigates cooperative behaviors in adolescents using a repeated Prisoner's Dilemma game. The computational modeling approach used in the study is solid and well established, yet evidence supporting certain claims remains incomplete. The work could be strengthened with the consideration of additional experimental contexts, non-linear relationships between age and observed behavior, and modeling details. If these concerns are addressed, the results will be of interest to developmental psychologists, economists, and social psychologists.

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 will be of interest to researchers studying numerical cognition, brain lateralization, and cognitive brain development more broadly.

eLife Assessment

The open-source software Chromas tracks and analyses cephalopod chromatophore dynamics. The software features a user-friendly interface alongside detailed instructions for its application, with compelling exemplary applications to two widely divergent cephalopod species, a squid and a cuttlefish, over time periods large enough to encompass new chromatophore development among existing ones. It demonstrates accurate tracking of the position and identity of each chromatophore. The software and methods outlined therein will become an important tool for scientists tracking dynamic signaling in animals.

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.

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.

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.