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.
Despite lacking a fovea and high spatial acuity, tree shrews demonstrate robust transformation-tolerant object recognition comparable to primates, suggesting that high-level visual generalization relies on intermediate and deep cortical processing rather than front-end optical resolution.
Using selectively bred rats to model internalizing and externalizing temperaments, this study demonstrates that the acquisition of cocaine and heroin self-administration is differentially influenced by drug class, sex, and temperament, revealing that the female-specific "telescoping effect" for opioid addiction is primarily driven by externalizing traits.
This study demonstrates that male mice selectively approach conspecifics based on specific acoustic and temporal features of ultrasonic vocalizations recorded during social chasing, particularly responding to the calls of chased individuals rather than those of the chasers.
This study demonstrates that while bumblebees' response latencies in judgment bias tasks reflect stable individual traits, their actual chamber choices are largely state-dependent and influenced by transient external factors.
This study of the cleaner wrasse *Labroides dimidiatus* reveals that incomplete social dominance and flexible life-history strategies, such as rapid growth and harem switching, drive complex sex change dynamics that challenge traditional models of socially regulated protogynous sex change.
Using an agent-based model of Andean condors, this study demonstrates that in unpredictable, patchy landscapes, individuals who combine intermediate risk-taking with high reliance on social information can achieve up to 41% energy savings compared to asocial movement.
By integrating laboratory flow-respirometry, mesocosm accelerometer data, and multi-year field telemetry, this study reveals that while red drum can exploit turbulent wakes to reduce swimming costs in controlled settings, their wild habitat selection is primarily driven by ecological factors like foraging and predation refuge rather than hydrodynamic efficiency alone.
This study demonstrates that while calming interventions like synthetic pheromones and pressure harnesses do not reduce the frequency or intensity of puppy whining during separation, they effectively lower fundamental frequency, variability, and acoustic roughness, thereby revealing subtle reductions in emotional arousal through bioacoustic analysis.
Contrary to the typical expectation of higher male mortality in polygynous species, a study on the protogynous cleaner wrasse *Labroides dimidiatus* during the 2024 El Niño event revealed that terminal-phase males exhibited greater survival than initial-phase females, whose mortality more than doubled due to physiological vulnerabilities linked to faster growth rates.
This paper demonstrates that the sea hare's buccal mass achieves large odontophore protractions during distinct feeding behaviors through context-dependent mechanical reconfigurations, revealing a fundamental distinction between "constrained" and "unconstrained" muscular hydrostats that rely on different control strategies based on the presence of mechanical constraints.