Animal Behavior and Cognition

A cross-species framework for investigating perceptual evidence accumulation

1. Sucheta Chakravarty
2. Cristina Delgado-Sallent
3. Gary A Kane
4. Hongjie Xia
5. Quan H Do
6. Ryan A Senne
7. Benjamin B Scott

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This translational study presents a direct cross-species comparison (between mice, rats, and humans) of choice behavior in the same perceptual decision-making task. The study is rare in opening a window on the evolution of decision-making, and the results will be important for many disciplines including behavioral sciences, psychology, neuroscience, and psychiatry. While the strength of the evidence presented is solid, the manuscript would benefit from additional information and analyses to strengthen and clarify its main conclusions.

Reviewed by eLife

Prefrontal working memory signal controls phase-coded information within extrastriate cortex

1. Mohsen Parto-Dezfouli
2. Isabel Vanegas
3. Mohammad Zarei
4. William H Nesse
5. Kelsey L Clark
6. Behrad Noudoost

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study investigates how the maintenance of a spatial location in working memory affects the representation of visual information in area V4 of monkeys. As such, it is important not only for understanding vision but also for determining how working memory impacts perceptual signals and their underlying circuits. The data provide convincing evidence of a direct communication between prefrontal circuits that store spatial information and V4, which, under the current experimental conditions, manifests mainly as changes in temporal activity patterns (oscillations).

Reviewed by eLife

Screening for links between behaviour and acute hyperthermia and hypoxia resistance in rainbow trout using isogenic lines

1. Henri Lagarde
2. Delphine Lallias
3. Florence Phocas
4. Lionel Goardon
5. Marjorie Bideau
6. François Guyvarc’h
7. Laurent Labbé
8. Mathilde Dupont-Nivet
9. Xavier Cousin

Reviewed by Peer Community in Animal Science

Modeling collective behavior in groups of mice housed under semi-naturalistic conditions

1. Xiaowen Chen
2. Maciej Winiarksi
3. Alicja Puścian
4. Ewelina Knapska
5. Thierry Mora
6. Aleksandra M Walczak

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This valuable work investigates the social interactions of mice living together in a system of multiple connected cages. It provides solid evidence for a statistical approach capturing changes in social interactions after manipulating prefrontal cortical plasticity. This research will be of broad interest to researchers studying animal social behavior.

Reviewed by eLife

Maternal behavior influences vocal practice and learning processes in the greater sac-winged bat

1. Ahana Aurora Fernandez
2. Nora Serve
3. Sarah-Cecil Fabian
4. Mirjam Knörnschild

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study provides insights into the role of maternal behavior in the learning and ontogeny of vocalization. It finds evidence that the maternal behavior of sac-winged bats (Saccopteryx bilineata) can influence the learned territorial songs of their pups. The behavioral analyses are convincing, using longitudinal acoustic recordings and behavioral monitoring of individual mother-pup pairs across development and multiple wild bat colonies. The work will be relevant to a broad audience interested in the evolution and development of social behavior as well as sensory-motor learning.

Reviewed by eLife

Interdependence between SEB-3 receptor and NLP-49 peptides shifts across predator-induced defensive behavioral modes in Caenorhabditis elegans

1. Kathleen T Quach
2. Gillian A Hughes
3. Sreekanth H Chalasani

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study presents a valuable finding on predator threat detection in C. elegans and the role of neuropeptide systems in defensive behavioral strategies. The evidence supporting the conclusions is solid, although additional analyses and control experiments would strengthen the claims of the study. Overall, the work is of interest to the C. elegans community as well as neuroethologists and ecologists studying predator-prey interactions.

Reviewed by eLife

Heron, a Knowledge Graph editor for intuitive implementation of Python-based experimental pipelines

1. George Dimitriadis
2. Ella Svahn
3. Andrew F MacAskill
4. Athena Akrami

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This valuable paper introduces Heron, lightweight scientific software that is designed to streamline the implementation of complex experimental pipelines. The software is tailored for workflows that require coordinating many logical steps across interconnected hardware components with heterogeneous computing environments. The authors convincingly demonstrate Heron's utility and effectiveness in the context of behavioral experiments, addressing a growing need among experimentalists for flexible and scalable solutions that accommodate diverse and evolving hardware requirements.

Reviewed by eLife

Diverse prey capture strategies in teleost larvae

1. Duncan S Mearns
2. Sydney A Hunt
3. Martin W Schneider
4. Ash V Parker
5. Manuel Stemmer
6. Herwig Baier

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important body of work uses state-of-the-art quantitative methods to characterize and compare behaviors across five different fish species to understand which features are conserved and which ones are differentiated. The convincing results from this study will be of interest to ethologists and also have potential utility in understanding the neural mechanisms leading to these behaviors.

Reviewed by eLife, Arcadia Science

Projections from thalamic nucleus reuniens to hippocampal CA1 area participate in context fear extinction by affecting extinction-induced molecular remodeling of excitatory synapses

1. Magdalena Ziółkowska
2. Narges Sotoudeh
3. Anna Cały
4. Monika Puchalska
5. Roberto Pagano
6. Malgorzata Alicja Śliwińska
7. Ahmad Salamian
8. Kasia Radwanska

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This work provides important findings characterizing potential synaptic mechanisms supporting the role of midline thalamus-hippocampal projections in fear memory extinction in mice. The methods and approaches were considered solid, though some evidence is incomplete as there are some concerns with the analytical approaches used for some aspects of the study. This work will be of interest to those in the field of thalamic regulation and fear memory.

Reviewed by eLife

Vasopressin 1a receptor antagonist disrupts male-male affiliative relationships formed by triadic cohabitation in large-billed crows

1. Akiko Seguchi
2. Ei-Ichi Izawa

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study investigates the role of vasopressin in modulating same-sex affiliative relationships in the context of linear dominance hierarchies. It provides convincing evidence that vasopressin signaling is involved in modulating aspects of affiliative behavior, although the evidence that affiliative relationships specifically arise from the triadic interaction study design is incomplete. Nevertheless, its focus on broadening the types of social relationships and species studied in this area makes it of interest to both neuroendocrinologists and colleagues studying the evolution and mechanisms underlying social affiliation.

Reviewed by eLife