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 demonstrates that wild guppies adaptively increase their sociality in response to unpredictable, ephemeral food resources, utilizing flexible fission-fusion dynamics to enhance foraging success rather than simply aggregating due to satiation or local density.
This paper presents a normative Bayesian model demonstrating that while resource depletion accelerates the learning of local resource rates within patches, it does not speed up the slower, sample-dependent learning of global patch composition, leading to a divergence between reward-maximizing and information-seeking strategies that shapes optimal foraging departure rules.
This study demonstrates that Pied avocets and Black-winged stilts exhibit significant behavioural flexibility in their food transport mechanisms, dynamically adjusting their head and beak kinematics in response to food moisture and water availability to maintain feeding performance across varying environmental conditions.
This study demonstrates that an acute jet-lag-like phase shift impairs contextual fear memory in male mice by triggering a sex-specific overactivation of the orexinergic lateral hypothalamus, supramammillary nucleus, and dorsal hippocampal dentate gyrus circuit.
This study investigates the trade-off between foraging and vigilance in red-legged seriemas feeding on hard-shelled fruit, revealing that while individuals within a pair often specialize in either throwing fruit or remaining vigilant, they do not exhibit synchronized or coordinated behaviors to share vigilance costs.
This study demonstrates that marmosets exhibit norm-like vocal behavior by expecting and affiliating with partners who converge their calls, while protesting and attempting to restore similarity when partners diverge, indicating that vocal accommodation in these primates is a socially regulated behavior with normative properties.
This study demonstrates that learning to reach with mirror-reversed feedback relies on explicit motor and perceptual awareness and generalizes to novel targets, whereas learning with a standard visuomotor rotation occurs implicitly without generalization.
This study demonstrates that in Betta splendens, the divergent behavioral outcomes of social competition arise not from persistent differences in individual gene expression, but from asymmetric, outcome-specific remodeling of whole-brain transcriptomic networks involving immune, neuroendocrine, and purinergic systems.
This study demonstrates that applying human acoustic analysis to zebra finch song reveals distinct vocal biomarkers—specifically non-linear spectral and intensity changes for aging versus increased fundamental frequency variability and intensity regulation deficits for Parkinson's disease—thereby validating the songbird as a translational model for differentiating age-related and disease-related vocal impairments.
This study demonstrates that while learning temporal intervals and spatial line segments follows similar rapid improvement trajectories, spatial learning achieves higher accuracy and precision more quickly and sustains better transfer to untrained magnitudes, with feedback playing a crucial role in enhancing precision and generalization across both domains.