Animal Behavior and Cognition

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

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

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

Scale-sensitive Mouse Facial Expression Pipeline using a Surrogate Calibration Task

1. Andre Telfer
2. Oliver van Kaick
3. Alfonso Abizaid

Reviewed by PREreview

Specific Sensitivity to Rare and Extreme Events: Quasi-Complete Black Swan Avoidance vs Partial Jackpot Seeking in Rat Decision-Making

1. Mickaël Degoulet
2. Louis-Matis Willem
3. Christelle Baunez
4. Stéphane Luchini
5. Patrick A Pintus

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study represents an important contribution to the study of decision-making under risk, bringing an interdisciplinary approach spanning economic theory, behavioral neuroscience, and computational modeling to test how choice preference is influenced by rare and extreme events. The authors present evidence that rats are indeed sensitive to these rare and extreme events despite their infrequent occurrence, driven primarily by an almost complete avoidance of "Black Swans" - rare and extreme losses. The evidence for specific sensitivity to rare and extreme events however remains incomplete, owing in part to the difficulty of isolating the effect of these events beyond that arising from risk preferences more generally in both task design and in the computational modeling of the choice behavior. Given the approach here brings a relatively novel perspective, with a more detailed treatment of these confounds this paper will be of broad interest to those seeking to understand animal behavior through the lens of economic choice.

Reviewed by eLife

Fine-scale tracking reveals visual field use for predator detection and escape in collective foraging of pigeon flocks

1. Mathilde Delacoux
2. Fumihiro Kano

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  In this fundamental study, the authors use innovative fine-scale motion capture technologies to study visual vigilance with high-acuity vision, to estimate the visual fixation of free-feeding pigeons. The authors present compelling evidence for use of the fovea to inspect predator cues, the behavioral state influencing the latency for fovea use, and the use of the fovea decreasing the latency to escape of both the focal individual and other flock members. The work will be of broad interest to behavioral ecologists.

Reviewed by eLife

Landing force reveals new form of motion-induced sound camouflage in a wild predator

1. Kim Schalcher
2. Estelle Milliet
3. Robin Séchaud
4. Roman Bühler
5. Bettina Almasi
6. Simon Potier
7. Paolo Becciu
8. Alexandre Roulin
9. Emily LC Shepard

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This fundamental work substantially advances our understanding of animals' foraging behaviour by monitoring the movement and body posture of barn owls in high resolution and assessing their foraging success. With a large dataset, the evidence supporting the main conclusions is compelling. This work provides new corroboration for motion-induced sound camouflage and has broad implications for understanding predator-prey interactions.

Reviewed by eLife

Prediction error determines how memories are organized in the brain

1. Nicholas GW Kennedy
2. Jessica C Lee
3. Simon Killcross
4. R Fred Westbrook
5. Nathan M Holmes

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This is a fundamental study examining the role of prediction error in state allocation of memories. The data provided are convincing and largely support the conclusion that a gradual change between acquisition and extinction maintains the memory state of acquisition and thus results in extinction that is resistant to restoration. This paper is of interest to behavioural and neuroscience researchers studying learning, memory, and the neural mechanisms of those processes as well as to clinicians using extinction-based therapies in treating anxiety-based disorders

Reviewed by eLife