136 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 study reveals that high-speed pursuit in cheetahs relies on a dual head-orientation strategy where the head is robustly stabilized in pitch relative to the target while simultaneously employing predictive yaw tracking to anticipate prey movement, allowing the torso to focus on generating a closing trajectory.
This study demonstrates that lab mice, without food restriction, learn to forage for hidden resources in a complex, dynamic environment by reorganizing their existing behaviors into structured, high-quality bouts of sampling and site-checking, thereby establishing a novel approach for investigating the neural and evolutionary basis of naturalistic decision-making.
This study reveals that resting associations among free-ranging dogs in West Bengal are significantly shaped by dyad sex composition and group demographics, with female-female and mixed-sex pairs exhibiting stronger bonds than male-male pairs, while association strength decreases with group size but increases with a higher male-to-female ratio.
This study demonstrates that bumblebees exhibit vertebrate-like top-down visual attention, where higher sucrose rewards enhance flower detection accuracy and contrast sensitivity, while the pesticide imidacloprid impairs detection accuracy without affecting response latency.
This study demonstrates that environmental complexity fosters stable, long-term expression of animal personality (specifically boldness) in Arctic charr, suggesting that monitoring behavioral variance through an animal personality framework offers a valuable approach for diagnosing fish welfare, even in the absence of direct covariation with growth rate or brain size.
This study demonstrates that providing running wheels significantly increases locomotor activity in group-housed hamsters, whereas increasing cage size shows only a marginal, non-significant trend toward higher activity levels.
This paper demonstrates that animal groups achieve faster and more reliable collective escape than solitary individuals by employing "social discounting"—a strategy where an animal weighs a neighbor's stillness as evidence of safety to suppress false alarms—allowing them to maintain constant error rates regardless of group size, a mechanism empirically validated in wild sulphur molly shoals.
This study demonstrates that mice shift from reactive model-free to deliberative structure-informed decision-making strategies during the early stages of training in a dynamic environment, challenging the traditional view that such transitions occur only after extensive practice.
This study challenges the claim that Motion Sequencing (MoSeq) syllables substantially outperform traditional scalar features in classifying drug effects, demonstrating that the reported performance gap is largely driven by analytical choices and narrows significantly under standardized conditions, suggesting scalar features remain a competitive and accessible alternative for many applications.
Using a novel tracking system called sociSleep that avoids altering social states during testing, researchers found that while chronic social isolation has little effect on *Drosophila* sleep, recent social loss robustly increases it, indicating that recent social experience rather than long-term isolation is the primary driver of sleep changes.