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 paper introduces the Successor Representation with Importance Sampling (SR-IS), a novel model that constructs policy-independent predictive maps to enable efficient, flexible planning and better explains human replanning biases compared to existing theories.
Through a series of drawing experiments with adults and children, this study demonstrates that human spatial memory is fundamentally structured around preserved topological relations, such as junctions and holes, while metric details like angles and lengths are systematically distorted and degraded over time.
This study challenges the hypothesis that human speech evolved through an expansion of vocal acoustic range, demonstrating that speech and song actually occupy a significantly smaller and statistically indistinguishable acoustic feature space compared to human non-linguistic vocalizations and the calls of close primate relatives.
Based on long-term data from wild chimpanzees, this study demonstrates that individuals proactively reorganize their social networks by increasing the breadth and efficiency of their affiliative interactions prior to risky collective territorial defense, suggesting a shared evolutionary mechanism for preparing hominid groups for social dilemmas.
This paper introduces a Distributed Model that incorporates dimensional outcome representations into associative learning, demonstrating through four experiments that it significantly outperforms traditional binary models in predicting continuous outcomes and better reflects how humans encode causal relationships in complex environments.
This paper presents a comprehensive multimodal dataset that enables the 3D reconstruction of common marmoset body-environment interactions by integrating CT-derived meshes, rigged models, synchronized multi-view behavioral videos, and environmental models to support advanced behavioral analysis and digital-twin applications.
This study demonstrates that captive common marmosets exhibit flexible, call-type-specific volubility and vocal coordination under information asymmetry, characterized by status-dependent alertness responses, sex-biased food calling, and distinct patterns of vocal contagion and recruitment between dyad partners.
This study establishes that a procedure-matched control design is essential for valid comparisons between TNBS and DSS rat ulcerative colitis models, revealing that TNBS induces a more variable, Th1-polarized immune profile suitable for T-cell-targeted therapies, whereas DSS offers a more consistent, innate barrier-disruption model ideal for epithelial repair and microbiome interventions.
This pre-registered study demonstrates that continuous psychophysics combined with Kalman filter analysis effectively reveals how auditory cues significantly reduce sensory noise and improve the precision of both manual and ocular tracking of visual objects, particularly under conditions of high visual uncertainty.
This study demonstrates that the exogenous ketone precursor (R,S)-1,3-butanediol improves memory in female tauopathy mice fed a standard chow diet by inducing ketosis, but these cognitive benefits are abolished in males or in mice of either sex consuming a high-fat Western diet due to blunted ketosis and sex-specific metabolic responses.