112 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.
Using wireless virtual reality to study human escape behavior, this research reveals that humans employ a distinct set of stereotyped kinematic patterns shaped by threat and context, which cannot be extrapolated from other mammals and offer new insights into the neural mechanisms of survival.
The manuscript titled "Recognition without aggression: divergent regulation of food sharing in Argentine ant supercolonies" has been withdrawn by the authors due to model misspecifications, and they request that it not be cited.
This study demonstrates for the first time in a nonhuman animal that informational masking—where background sounds interfere with the ability to attend to a signal despite it being audible—can impair crucial mate-choice decisions in treefrogs.
This study demonstrates that well-nourished cichlids exhibit greater behavioral flexibility and faster stress recovery when facing frequent predator exposure, suggesting that energy reserves are essential for buffering the cognitive costs of repeated stress.
This study demonstrates that temporary pasture access improves equine welfare by inducing transcriptomic changes that correlate with reduced aggressiveness and a shift from maladaptive inflammatory states toward healthy, anabolic physiological processes in resilient horses.
Researchers have developed a novel transgenic mouse model that successfully mimics the multisystemic neurodegeneration, behavioral deficits, and polyG protein aggregation characteristic of Neuronal Intranuclear Inclusion Disease (NIID).
Through a large-scale experiment monitoring physiological responses during film viewing, this study demonstrates that effective narrative messages entrain audience biology into a shared, content-locked processing hierarchy, thereby redefining the audience as a network of aligned receivers rather than a collection of variable individuals.
This paper presents a novel framework combining Hidden Markov Models with Step Selection Functions to infer ecologically meaningful behavioral states from animal movement and environmental data, addressing key limitations of traditional methods by sequentially integrating movement metrics and environmental predictors to accurately identify state numbers, labels, and context-dependent ecological responses.
This preliminary field study on racing Thoroughbreds reveals that while sleep quantity shifts with age, sleep quality is significantly associated with higher morning cortisol levels and increased abnormal behaviors, suggesting a strong link between poor sleep quality and compromised welfare in this population.
This study demonstrates that acute exposure to low concentrations of ethanol does not induce pessimistic or optimistic cognitive judgment bias or alter locomotor behavior in honeybees, suggesting that their cognition is resilient to this naturally occurring neuroactive compound.