Animal Behavior and Cognition

eLife Assessment

This paper provides 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. The work will be of interest to ethologists and developmental psychologists.

eLife Assessment

This study addresses an important question and shows how social navigation in homing pigeons can be explained by simple averaging, without requiring any complex cognitive abilities. The evidence, based on a rigorous and systematic comparison of seven models and data on how social routes can be generated from solitary routes, is compelling. The authors should be commended for their willingness to critically re-examine established interpretations.

eLife Assessment

In this important study, the authors provide compelling evidence that the likelihood of looking behaviour is predicted by the expected information gain, hence constituting an invaluable formal model and explanation of habituation. Such modelling represents a crucial advance in explanation, over-and-above less specified models that can be fitted post hoc to any empirical pattern. The findings would be of interest to researchers studying cognitive development, and perception and learning more broadly.

eLife Assessment

This paper reports a useful low-cost platform for studying mosquito behaviors such as flight activity, sugar feeding, and host-seeking responses over the course of several weeks, and demonstrates key applications of this platform. While the authors provide a biological proof of principle, the evidence that supports the validation of the tracking algorithm is incomplete; it lacks biological replicates, independent confirmation of the tracking algorithm, and data on mosquito survival.

eLife Assessment

Shen et al. present a computational account of individual differences in mouse exploration when faced with a novel object in an open field from a previously published study (Akiti et al.) that relates subject-specific intrinsic exploration and caution about potential hazards to the spectrum of behaviors observed in this setting. Overall, this computational study is an important contribution that leverages a very general modeling framework (a Bayes Adaptive Markov Decision Process) to quantify and interrogate distinct drivers of exploratory behavior under potential threat. Given their assumptions, the modeling results are convincing: the authors are able to describe a substantial amount of the behavioral features and idiosyncracies in this dataset, and their model affords a normative interpretation related to inherent risk aversion and predation hazard "flexibility" of individual animals and should be of broad interest to researchers working to understand open-ended exploratory behaviors.

eLife Assessment

This study provides a valuable examination of the social discrimination abilities of a jumping spider, Phippidus regius, based on visual cues. Behavioral essays yielded solid evidence that these spiders discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar individuals on the basis of visual cues, however the experimental support for individual recognition and long-term memory is incomplete. While the results supply evidence of discrimination, additional experiments would be needed to verify the evidence of individual recognition.

eLife Assessment

This fundamental work significantly advances our understanding of gravity sensing and orientation behavior in the ctenophore, an animal of major importance in understanding the evolution of nervous systems. Through comprehensive reconstruction with volumetric electron microscopy, and time-lapse imaging of cilia motion, the authors provide compelling evidence that the aboral nerve net coordinates the activity of balancer cilia. The resemblance to the ciliomotor circuit in marine annelids provides a fascinating example of how neural circuits may convergently evolve to solve common sensorimotor challenges.

eLife Assessment

This important model-based study seeks to mimic bat echolocation behavior and flight under conditions of high interference, such as when large numbers of bats leave their roost together. The simulations convincingly suggest that the problem of acoustic jamming in these situations may be less severe than previously thought. This finding will be of broad interest to scientists working in the fields of bat biology and collective behaviour.

eLife Assessment

This study reveals that female moths use ultrasonic sounds emitted by dehydrated plants to guide their oviposition decisions. It highlights sound as an additional sensory modality in host searching, adding an important piece to the puzzle of how insects and plants interact. Through convincing experimental approaches, the authors provide insights that advance our understanding of plant-insect interactions.

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.