110 papers
Animal behavior and cognition explores the fascinating inner lives of creatures big and small, from how a crow solves a puzzle to why dogs seem to understand human emotions. This field investigates the mental processes and social interactions that drive the natural world, revealing that intelligence and awareness take many forms across species.
At Gist.Science, we bring these discoveries directly from bioRxiv to your screen. Our team processes every new preprint in this category from bioRxiv, ensuring you have access to the latest research through both detailed technical summaries and easy-to-understand plain-language explanations. Whether you are a researcher or a curious reader, you can dive deep into the data or grasp the core concepts without the barrier of dense academic jargon.
Below are the most recent papers exploring the minds and behaviors of animals, freshly processed and ready for you to explore.
This systematic review of 47 studies spanning two decades synthesizes current knowledge on corvid cognitive development across social and physical domains, highlighting both parallels with primates and significant research gaps regarding sample sizes, longitudinal data, and under-explored abilities like executive function and Theory of Mind.
This study demonstrates that vessel noise in Saint Andrew Bay, Florida, significantly disrupts Red Drum spawning choruses by reducing their sound production levels and prevalence, particularly during peak spawning seasons when vessel traffic is frequent.
This study introduces a robust, automated machine learning paradigm that integrates multiple behavioral metrics to overcome the limitations of traditional single-metric light/dark box tests, thereby significantly improving the reliability and accuracy of visual function assessment in mice.
This one-year study evaluating the introduction of artificial plants in a zebrafish facility found that while the enrichment was cost-effective and harmless, it yielded no significant improvements in fertility, sex ratio, or pathogen burden, and only a non-significant increase in survival, likely because baseline survival rates were already high.
This preregistered fMRI study challenges the traditional view of a strict spatial division between social perception and mentalizing brain regions by demonstrating that both posterior STS and TPJ integrate bottom-up relational processing and top-down generative inverse-planning computations, likely operating on distinct temporal scales.
This study demonstrates that the nocturnal fall armyworm relies on the critical integration of visual and geomagnetic cues for accurate seasonal migratory orientation, as visual inputs are indispensable for maintaining flight stability and processing magnetic direction.
This study utilizes a spatial agent-based model to demonstrate that intergroup tolerance in mixed-sex groups emerges synergistically from the combined effects of resource heterogeneity, which increases encounter frequency, and social threats from bachelor males, which drive protective aggregation, without requiring preprogrammed cooperation.
The paper introduces the Training Village, an open-source, automated, and affordable home-cage system that enables continuous, personalized cognitive training and monitoring of rodents to overcome the labor and expertise barriers of traditional behavioral research.
This study introduces a deep learning model trained on a large, diverse dataset that outperforms human raters in automatically assessing Mouse Grimace Scale scores across varied strains and conditions, demonstrating that combining multiple subsets yields the most reliable performance for non-standardized pain assessment.
This study characterizes the high-amplitude type 0 phase-response curve of the orb weaver *Metazygia wittfeldae* and identifies candidate light-responsive genes with dynamic expression patterns that align with the observed circadian phase shifts.