Animal Behavior and Cognition

Hippocampal neuroinflammation causes sex-specific disruptions in action selection, food approach memories, and neuronal activation

1. Kiruthika Ganesan
2. Sahar Ghorbanpour
3. William Kendall
4. Sarah Thomas Broome
5. Joanne M. Gladding
6. Amolika Dhungana
7. Arvie Rodriguez Abiero
8. Maedeh Mahmoudi
9. Alessandro Castorina
10. Michael D. Kendig
11. Serena Becchi
12. Veronika Valova
13. Louise Cole
14. Laura A. Bradfield

Reviewed by preLights

Why the brown ghost chirps at night

1. Livio Oboti
2. Federico Pedraja
3. Marie Ritter
4. Marlena Lohse
5. Lennart Klette
6. Rüdiger Krahe

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study addresses a significant question in sensory ethology and active sensing in particular. It links the production of a specific signal - electrosensory chirps - to various contexts and conditions to propose that chirps may also serve an active sensing role in addition to their more well-known role in communication. The evidence supporting the role for active sensing is strong. In particular, the evidence showing increased chirping in more cluttered environments and the relationship between chirping and movement are convincing. The study provides a lot of valuable data, and is likely to stimulate follow-up behavioral and physiological studies.

Reviewed by eLife

Contributions of associative and non-associative learning to the dynamics of defensive ethograms

1. Quan-Son Eric Le
2. Daniel Hereford
3. Chandrashekhar D Borkar
4. Zach Aldaco
5. Julia Klar
6. Alexis Resendez
7. Jonathan P Fadok

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study is deemed to be an important work that carefully deconstructs multi-faceted conditioned fear behavior in mice. The well-controlled experiments provide convincing data that will be of interest to other researchers in the field.

Reviewed by eLife

Risking your Tail: Modeling Individual Differences in Risk-sensitive Exploration using Bayes Adaptive Markov Decision Processes

1. Tingke Shen
2. Peter Dayan

• Curated by eLife

  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.

Reviewed by eLife

Unsupervised discovery of family specific vocal usage in the Mongolian gerbil

1. Ralph E Peterson
2. Aman Choudhri
3. Catalin Mitelut
4. Aramis Tanelus
5. Athena Capo-Battaglia
6. Alex H Williams
7. David M Schneider
8. Dan H Sanes

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This valuable study provides an experimental paradigm and state-of-the-art analysis method for studying the existence of call types and transition differences among Mongolian gerbil families in a naturalistic environment. The analyses are convincing, with a thorough treatment of the acoustic data and a demonstration of the robustness of the observed effect across days. The work will likely be of interest to the auditory neuroscience and neuroethology communities.

Reviewed by eLife

Polarised moonlight guides nocturnal bull ants home

1. Cody A Freas
2. Ajay Narenda
3. Trevor Murray
4. Ken Cheng

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study substantially advances our understanding of nocturnal animal navigation and the ways that animals use polarized light. The evidence supporting the conclusions is convincing, with elegant behavioural experiments in actively navigating ants. The work will be of interest to biologists working on animal navigation or sensory ecology.

Reviewed by eLife

WNKs regulate mouse behavior and alter central nervous system glucose uptake and insulin signaling

1. Ankita B Jaykumar
2. Derk Binns
3. Clinton A Taylor
4. Anthony Anselmo
5. Shari G Birnbaum
6. Kimberly M Huber
7. Melanie H Cobb

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study seeks to expand the understanding of insulin and glucose responses in the brain, specifically by implicating a family of protein kinases responsive to insulin. The significance of the study to the field is valuable. The evidence supporting the conclusions about brain glucose utilization is convincing, although there are several aspects that could benefit from additional validation to strengthen the claims.

Reviewed by eLife

Olfactory basis for essential amino acid perception during foraging in Caenorhabditis elegans

1. Ritika Siddiqui
2. Nikita Mehta
3. Gopika Ranjith
4. Marie-Anne Felix
5. Changchun Chen
6. Varsha Singh

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This is an important study, supported by solid data, that suggests a model for diet selection in C. elegans. The significance is that while C. elegans has long been known to be attracted to bacterial volatiles, what specific bacterial volatiles may signify to C. elegans is largely unknown. This study also provides evidence for a possible odorant/GPCR pairing.

Reviewed by eLife

Endogenous Precision of the Number Sense

1. Arthur Prat-Carrabin
2. Michael Woodford

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This research investigates the precision of numerosity perception in two different tasks and concludes that human performance aligns with an efficient coding model optimized for current environmental statistics and task goals. The findings may have important implications for our understanding of numerosity perception as well as the ongoing debate on different efficient coding models. However, the evidence presented in the paper to support the conclusion is still incomplete and could be strengthened by further modeling analysis or experimental data that can address potential confounds.

Reviewed by eLife

Developmental stage shapes the realized energy landscape for a flight specialist

1. Elham Nourani
2. Louise Faure
3. Hester Brønnvik
4. Martina Scacco
5. Enrico Bassi
6. Wolfgang Fiedler
7. Martin U Grüebler
8. Julia S Hatzl
9. David Jenny
10. Andrea Roverselli
11. Petra Sumasgutner
12. Matthias Tschumi
13. Martin Wikelski
14. Kamran Safi

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This important study substantially advances our understanding of energy landscapes and their link to animal ontogeny. The evidence supporting the conclusions is compelling, with high-throughput telemetry data and advanced track segmentation methods used to develop and map energy landscapes. The work will be of broad interest to animal ecologists.

Reviewed by eLife