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 study demonstrates that verbal confidence reports are more sensitive than numerical ones in distinguishing correct from incorrect perceptual decisions, while both formats prove equally effective in facilitating accurate judgment revisions during dyadic collaboration.
Autobehaver is an interpretable, AI-driven pipeline that combines a low-cost recording platform with deep learning and machine learning techniques to quantitatively analyze and classify complex Drosophila behaviors, successfully identifying neural, age-related, and intermediate phenotypic changes.
This study demonstrates that song recognition in the parasitoid fly *Ormia ochracea* relies on a multidimensional encoding of independent temporal features (pulse duration and interpulse interval) rather than a single derived parameter like pulse rate, revealing that the fly's preference for 50 pulses/s emerges from an underlying feature space.
This paper introduces the open-source, reproducible `ai-pam-pipeline` framework for CNN-based cetacean vocalization detection, demonstrating through controlled experiments that preprocessing choices like FFT window length significantly impact cross-domain generalization while achieving high performance in both binary and multiclass detection tasks.
Selection for increased male aggression in *Drosophila melanogaster* drives a life-history trade-off where reduced mating success and altered chemical signaling are compensated by a significantly extended lifespan, ultimately reshaping the balance between survival and reproductive strategies.
The paper introduces eeeHive, a custom high-frequency (HF) RFID-based automated tracking system that overcomes the low data rates and simultaneous identification limitations of conventional low-frequency systems to enable high-resolution, long-term behavioral monitoring of group-housed animals across both terrestrial and aquatic species.
By analyzing 3D trajectories of *Anopheles gambiae* swarms, this study provides experimental evidence of collective behavior through the discovery of spatially correlated speed fluctuations among males, suggesting that mosquito swarms are driven by active male-male interactions rather than independent responses to a visual marker.
By combining high-resolution behavioural phenotyping with experimental partitioning of injury, immune stimulation, and live infection in *Drosophila*, this study demonstrates that fine-scale analysis of movement microstructure can distinguish adaptive sickness behaviour from pathogen-induced pathology, revealing that early changes in activity bout dynamics predict survival outcomes.
This paper proposes and validates a "calculus of attention" (CES) based on Control, Energy, and Surprise to demonstrate that high stability in these audiovisual features serves as an evolutionarily conserved signal of fitness and performance quality across human music, animal vocalizations, and live interactions.
This study demonstrates that artificial light intensity, structure, and background contrast significantly alter moth flight behavior by increasing attraction and path tortuosity, particularly with white LEDs and point sources, while higher background lighting suppresses flight activity, suggesting that mitigation policies should prioritize reducing light intensity.