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Results for “animal behavior and cognition”

Search indexed bioRxiv preprints in genomics, neuroscience, cell biology and bioinformatics. Read source abstracts and check manuscript versions; preprints are not peer reviewed.

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At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

FloBuzz: A Modular Feeder System for Automated Aversive Conditioning in Bees

Understanding how environmental stressors affect pollinator behavior is essential for assessing ecosystem health. Automated flower and robotic feeder systems (AFRFSs) have transformed how pollinator foraging and learning are studied. Still, most systems remain reward-centric, limiting their ability to probe aversive learning and nociception under field conditions. Here, we present FloBuzz, a modular AFRFS that couples automated reward delivery with computer-vision-based visit detection to trigger closed-loop electric-shock stimulation in free-flying honey bees. In our setup, FloBuzz consisted of a 3D-printed feeder with a shock grid, a syringe pump with fluid-level feedback, and an electric shock stimulus trigger module that applied user-defined shock patterns. In a proof-of-concept trial that alternated between shock-free, 6 V, and shock-free, 9 V intervals, bee visitation increased over time during shock-free periods but declined during shock periods, with a steeper decline at 9 V than at 6 V, demonstrating a voltage-dependent avoidance. By enabling programmable, time-resolved aversive stimulation at an artificial flower in outdoor conditions, FloBuzz expanded AFRFS capabilities beyond purely reward-based paradigms. Evidently, FloBuzzs modular design will permit the investigation of diverse behavioral paradigms, including studies of toxin exposure, cognitive plasticity, and reward processing.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2026

The development of navigation and attentional abilities shapes how children explore naturalistic environments

Exploration is fundamental to how children learn about the world. To explore a new environment comprehensively, a child must navigate without getting lost while simultaneously attending to salient information along the way. Both abilities improve across childhood, yet most studies examine them in isolation, often in constrained spaces with limited sensory complexity. Here, we asked 7- to 14-year-old children (N=42) and young adults (18-22; N=42) to freely explore a large furniture store in immersive virtual reality, which contained many objects and attention-capturing multisensory events. Surprisingly, despite traveling comparable distances, children explored less - they covered less spatial area and examined fewer unique objects than adults. Fine-grained analyses of their behaviors showed that the reduction in exploration was due to children spending more time backtracking and children taking longer to adapt to salient multisensory objects, which were uncorrelated across individuals after controlling for age and independently predicted exploration. However, only backtracking duration predicted success in a subsequent search task, demonstrating a link between navigational success during exploration and the quality of learned spatial representations for later use. Together, the results demonstrate that children explore less comprehensively than adults in large-scale spaces because they are susceptible to getting lost and perseverating on salient events nested within a large environment, but that these behaviors change with age. This suggests that while children are widely considered to be curious explorers within local environments, their ability to do so within larger environments is shaped by the maturation of cognitive systems that integrate experiences over complex contexts.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2021

First evidence towards chemical self-recognition in a gecko

Self-recognition is the ability to recognise stimuli originating from oneself. Humans and most great apes show evidence of true self-recognition in the mirror test. They use their reflection to remove a mark that is only visible in the mirror. Not all animals, however, rely primarily on vision. In lizards, chemical cues are important in social interactions. A number of lizard species show chemical self-recognition but it has never been investigated in a gecko species. Here, we test the tokay gecko (Gekko gecko) a territorial species with parental care on their ability to discriminate their own skin and faecal chemicals from those of same-sex, unfamiliar conspecifics. Geckos show a higher response rate towards chemicals from unfamiliar individuals compared to self-produced chemicals and a water control. Lizards showed self-directed behaviour, responded stronger to skin chemicals and females responded more than males. Our study provides first evidence towards self-recognition and for a social function of chemical present on faeces in tokay geckos but further tests are needed to confirm true self-recognition. Tokay geckos are an excellent model species to investigate individual recognition to demonstrate more sophisticated social cognitive abilities than have previously been attributed to reptiles.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2023

Pro-social and pro-cognitive effects of LIT-001, a novel oxytocin receptor agonist in a neurodevelopmental model of schizophrenia.

Social and cognitive dysfunctions are the most persistent symptoms of schizophrenia. Since oxytocin (OXT) is known to play a role in social functions and modulates cognitive processes, we investigated the effects of a novel, nonpeptide, selective OXT receptor agonist, LIT-001, in a neurodevelopmental model of schizophrenia. Administration of methylazoxymethanol acetate (MAM; 22 mg/kg) on the 17th day of pregnancy is known to cause developmental disturbances of the brain, which lead to schizophrenia-like symptomatology in the offspring. Here, we examined the effects of acutely administered LIT-001 (1, 3, and 10 mg/kg) in MAM-exposed males and females on social behaviour, communication and cognition. We report that MAM-treated adult male and female rats displayed reduced social behaviour, ultrasonic communication and novel object recognition test performance. LIT-001 partially reversed these deficits, increasing the total social interaction time and the number of happy 50 kHz ultrasonic calls in male rats. The compound ameliorated MAM-induced deficits in object discrimination in both sexes. Present results confirm the pro-social activity of LIT-001 and demonstrate its pro-cognitive effects following acute administration.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2024

Training Harbor Seals to Participate in Vocal Learning Experiments in a Zoo

Harbor seals (Phoca vitulina) are a common zoo species that show a scientifically valuable propensity for vocal learning. Under human care, the seals can be trained to associate vocalizations with cues. This ability is termed vocal usage learning and is characterized by learning to use a vocalization in a specific context. Among mammals, seals are prime candidates to investigate vocal learning. Yet, only a handful of reports exist on harbor seal vocal learning abilities, and even fewer document how these were trained or tested. Here, we investigate how, and if, two experimentally naive harbor seals under human care can be trained to participate in scientific experiments. We describe the training and testing of two seals in two basic vocal learning experiments. We trained the animals to vocalize upon the presentation of discriminative stimuli (SD) through operant conditioning methods and tested their abilities to i) vocalize and refrain from vocalizing on two distinct SDs, and ii) produce two different vocalizations upon the presentation of two different SDs. Both seals learned the tasks: the first task was achieved within 118 trials (22 errors to criterion) and 220 trials (40 errors to criterion), the second task within 480 trials (158 errors to criterion) and 380 trials (94 errors to criterion), respectively. Our results confirm that harbor seals are capable of vocal usage learning and further suggest that associating individually distinct vocalizations with different SDs may be more cognitively demanding than vocalizing and being silent on SD.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2024

Artoo-Detoo: What imitating a Star Wars droid reveals on allospecific vocal imitation in parrots and starlings

Vocal production learning is a widespread and remarkable phenomenon. However, the underlying mechanisms of allospecific vocal imitation are poorly understood. Parrots and corvids are well known for their imitation abilities, but imitation accuracy has not yet been studied across species in a comparative context. We compared imitation accuracy between nine parrot species and European starlings based on imitation of monophonic and multiphonic sounds, produced by the Star Wars droid R2-D2. Our results show that starlings were better at imitating multiphonic sounds than parrots. However, no difference in imitation accuracy was found between parrots and starlings when imitating monophonic sounds. The differences in imitating accuracy are likely based on a physiological difference in syrinx anatomy, rather than on perceptual or cognitive differences between starlings and parrots. Between our nine tested parrot species, we found that parrots with larger brains (e.g., African greys and amazon parrots) were less accurate at imitating monophonic sounds than smaller brained budgerigars and cockatiels. The use of citizen science in our study shows the great potential this has to expand data collection beyond traditional studies. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the evolution of communication complexity in vocal learners. Significance StatementVocal imitation is a hallmark of complex communication in animals, yet the mechanisms driving species differences remain poorly understood. By comparing vocal imitation across nine parrot species and European starlings, we demonstrate, for the first time, that differences in syrinx anatomy, rather than cognitive or perceptual capacities, underlie species-specific variation in imitation accuracy. Contrary to traditional expectations, smaller-brained parrots outperformed larger-brained species in monophonic sound imitation. These findings challenge assumptions that brain size is directly linked to imitation accuracy and offer insights into the evolution of complex communication. We used citizen science to create a uniquely large dataset of species imitating the same source, demonstrating the powerful potential of this approach to broaden research in comparative cognition and vocal learning.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2024

A Toolbox for Generating Multidimensional 3-D Objects with Fine-Controlled Feature Space: Quaddle 2.0

Multidimensional 3D-rendered objects are an important component of vision research and video- gaming applications, but it has remained challenging to parametrically control and efficiently generate those objects. Here, we describe a toolbox for controlling and efficiently generating 3D rendered objects composed of ten separate visual feature dimensions that can be fine-adjusted using python scripts. The toolbox defines objects as multi-dimensional feature vectors with primary dimensions (object body related features), secondary dimensions (head related features) and accessory dimensions (including arms, ears, or beaks). The toolkit interfaces with the freely available Blender software to create objects. The toolbox allows to gradually morph features of multiple feature dimensions, determine the desired feature similarity among objects, and automatize the generation of multiple objects in 3D object and 2D image formats. We document the use of multidimensional objects in a sequence learning task that embeds objects in a 3D- rendered augmented reality environment controlled by the gaming engine unity. Taken together, the toolbox enables the efficient generation of multidimensional objects with fine control of low- level features and higher-level object similarity useful for visual cognitive research and immersive visual environments.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2025

Early-life social instability affects aggression, but not response inhibition, in chickens

Living in complex social environments presents behavioural and cognitive challenges. A key challenge is the regulation of aggression, which may be facilitated by response inhibition, the ability to suppress inappropriate actions. In more complex social environments, greater variability in interactions may increase demands for aggression regulation, promoting the development of response inhibition. However, social instability, a form of complexity characterised by frequent changes in group composition, can elevate aggression and may instead impair inhibition. To test these competing predictions we raised 144 chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus) in either stable or unstable social groups for five weeks. We observed the aggression within their enclosures following the final manipulation, and assessed their response inhibition using a thwarting task and a cylinder task. Unstable groups initially showed more aggression than stable groups following regrouping, but this declined rapidly to the same lower level of aggression as the stable groups. Contrary to our predictions, there were no differences between birds raised in stable and unstable groups for any measure of response inhibition, and individual variation in aggression did not correlate with inhibitory performance. These findings suggest that social instability influences aggression but does not affect the development of response inhibition in chickens, highlighting the potential context- and species-specific nature of social effects on cognition.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2018

Higher-order discrimination learning by honey bees in a virtual environment

Non-elemental learning constitutes a cognitive challenge because, contrary to elemental learning forms, it does not rely on simple associations, as events to be learned are usually ambiguous in terms of reinforcement outcome. Negative patterning constitutes a paradigmatic case of non-elemental learning, as subjects have to learn that single elements A and B are reinforced while their conjunctive representation AB is not reinforced (A+, B+ vs. AB-). Solving this problem requires treating the compound AB as being different from the linear sum of its components in order to overcome stimulus ambiguity (A+/A- and B+/B-). The honey bee is the only insect capable of mastering negative patterning as shown by numerous studies restricted mainly to the olfactory domain. Here we studied the capacity of bees to solve a negative patterning discrimination in the visual domain and used to this end a virtual reality (VR) environment in which a tethered bee walking stationary on a treadmill faces visual stimuli projected on a semicircular screen. Stimuli are updated by the bees movements, thus creating an immersive environment. Bees were trained to discriminate single-colored gratings rewarded with sucrose solution (blue, green; A+, B+) from a non-rewarded composite grating (blue-green, AB-). Bees learned this discrimination in the VR environment and inhibited to this end linear processing of the composite grating, which otherwise is treated as the sum of its components. Our results show for the first time mastering of a non-linear visual discrimination in a VR environment by honey bees, thus highlighting the value of VR for the study of cognition in insects.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2023

Towards Choice Engineering

Effectively shaping human and animal behavior has been of great practical and theoretical importance for millennia. Here we ask whether quantitative models of choice can be used to achieve this goal more effectively than qualitative psychological principles. We term this approach, which is motivated by the effectiveness of engineering in the natural sciences, choice engineering. To address this question, we launched an academic competition, in which the academic participants were instructed to use either quantitative models or qualitative principles to design reward schedules that maximally bias choice in a repeated, two-alternative task. We found that a choice engineering approach was the most successful method for shaping behavior in our task. This is a proof of concept that quantitative models are ripe to be used in order to engineer behavior. Finally, we show that choice engineering can be effectively used to compare models in the cognitive sciences, thus providing an alternative to the standard statistical methods of model comparison that are based on likelihood or explained variance.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2026

COGNITIVE HETEROGENEITY AND AGING: AN AGE-INDEPENDENT CILIARY GENE PROGRAM TRACKS COGNITIVE RESILIENCE IN MICE

Cognitive decline with age is often viewed as inevitable, yet older animals show striking heterogeneity in functional trajectories, with many preserving cognitive integrity despite physiological decline. The biological basis of this resilience remains poorly understood, partly due to insensitive behavioral testing paradigms. Using an automated home-cage platform and hippocampal RNA sequencing, we integrated behavioral phenotyping with transcriptomic profiling to disentangle molecular programs linked to cognitive performance from chronological age. Behavioral data from 906 C57BL/6 mice across 129 standardized studies, trajectory-based modeling, variance-partitioned correlation, and stability-driven gene prioritization identified a transcriptional signature (271 genes) linked to cognitive state independent of age. Preserved cognition was associated with higher expression of genes governing ciliary structure and motility, neurite organization, and synaptic architecture, while impairment was associated with neuroimmune and metabolic-stress programs. A 38-gene cilia structural module score remained associated with resilience after controlling for age (partial rho = -0.81), with consistent effects across leave-one-out resampling. Because the constituent genes were selected on this same outcome, the module-level magnitude is not an unbiased effect-size estimate; recalibration against a null that reapplies the full selection procedure gave an empirical p of 0.026. This divergence emerged among genetically identical mice, indicating non-genetic, discrete hippocampal molecular signatures underlying individual differences. Cell-type attribution against the Allen Brain Cell Atlas localized the module predominantly to ependymal cells, with 27 of 38 genes ependymal-restricted (median detection 90.2% in ependymal cells versus 1.1% in CA1 glutamatergic neurons) and three genes (Dnah9, Dnai4, Kif9) also detected in CA1. The association was not attributable to ependymal tissue content: the module score was unrelated to Foxj1 expression (rho = -0.016) and the partial correlation was unchanged after adjustment for ependymal and choroid plexus marker panels, indicating that the module reflects how strongly the ciliary program is expressed rather than how many ependymal cells each sample contained. These findings support a conceptual shift: cognitive trajectories appear shaped by intrinsic molecular set points rather than by chronological age, with expression of a motile ciliary program at the cerebrospinal fluid interface, rather than the abundance of the cells carrying it, emerging as a candidate correlate of resilience. This approach offers a generalizable strategy for dissecting functional heterogeneity from aging and identifying pathways for hypothesis-driven tests of resilience across the lifespan.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2025

Redundant, weakly connected prefrontal hemispheres balance precision and capacity in spatial working memory

The prefrontal hemispheres must coordinate dynamically to maintain a unified representation of visual space. Recently, two opposing theories using distinct storage strategies have been proposed: A high-capacity specialized architecture, where each hemisphere governs contralateral behavior, and a fail-safe redundant one, where both hemispheres jointly guide behavior across the visual space. Here, we analyzed simultaneous bilateral prefrontal cortex recordings from three macaque monkeys performing a visuo-spatial working memory task. Both hemispheres equally predicted behavioral imprecision, decoding errors were weakly correlated between hemispheres, and serial dependence remained local within hemispheres, suggesting a redundant, weakly coupled organization. Attractor network simulations showed that redundancy improved precision when task demands were below memory capacity, while weak interhemispheric coupling increased capacity in more demanding tasks by allowing hemispheric specialization. These predicted patterns were validated in human and monkey data, reconciling previous findings and revealing a versatile interhemispheric architecture that adapts to varying cognitive demands.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2026

Experimental Emergence of Conventions in Human Dyads

Conventions can be defined as arbitrary and self-sustaining practices that emerge in a population and facilitate solving coordination problems. A recent study traced the formation of simple conventions in captive baboons in a touch-screen-based color-matching game. We replicated this task with human pairs under different conditions (with/without visual access to the partners screen; with/without prior information on the task structure) to assess their effects on the formation and stability of conventions. We found that more information delayed the formation of conventions (arbitrary rankings of colors that determined choices in any given color-pairing). Analysis of self-reported strategies did not reveal a clear effect of condition on levels of elicited strategic behavior. Interestingly, pairs maintained their conventions even when given visual access to their partners screen, despite the availability of an alternative, potentially simpler, cognitive strategy. In a follow-up variant of the task that paired up experienced subjects with a naive partner, conventions emerged faster but did not replicate the convention previously formed by the experienced player, demonstrating the transmission of "know-how" but not "know-what" information. We discuss the implications of our results for understanding the cognitive mechanisms necessary to support the formation, maintenance, and transmission of conventions.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2025

Recurrent Neural Network Exploration Strategies During Reinforcement Learning Depend on Network Capacity

Artificial neural networks constitute simplified computational models of neural circuits that might help understand how the biological brain solves and represents complex tasks. Previous research revealed that recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with 48 hidden units show human-level performance in restless four-armed bandit tasks but differ from humans with respect to the task strategy employed. Here we systematically examined the impact of network capacity (no. of hidden units) on computational mechanisms and performance. Computational modeling was applied to investigate and compare network behavior between capacity levels as well as between RNNs and human learners. Using a task frequently employed in human cognitive neuroscience work as well as in animal systems neuroscience work, we show that high-capacity networks displayed increased directed exploration and attenuated random exploration relative to low-capacity networks. RNNs with 576 hidden units approached "human-like" exploration strategies, but the overall switch rate and the level of perseveration still deviated from human learners. In the context of the resource-rational framework, which posits a trade-off between reward and policy complexity, human learners may devote more resources to solving the task, albeit without performance benefits over RNNs. Taken together, this work reveals the importance of network capacity on exploration strategies during reinforcement learning and therefore contributes to the goal of building neural networks that behave "human-like" to possibly gain insights into computational mechanisms in human brains.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2015

How can we study the evolution of animal minds?

AbstractDuring the last 50 years, comparative cognition and neurosciences have improved our understanding of animal minds while evolutionary ecology has revealed how selection acts on traits through evolutionary time. We describe how this evolutionary approach can be used to understand the evolution of animal cognition. We recount how comparative and fitness methods have been used to understand the evolution of cognition and outline how these methods could be extended to gain new insights into cognitive evolution. The fitness approach, in particular, offers unprecedented opportunities to study the evolutionary mechanisms responsible for variation in cognition within species and could allow us to investigate both proximate (ie: neural and developmental) and ultimate (ie: ecological and evolutionary) underpinnings of animal cognition together. Our goal in this review is to build a bridge between cognitive neuroscientist and evolutionary biologists, illustrate how their research could be complementary, and encourage evolutionary ecologists to include explicit attention to cognitive processes in their studies of behaviour. We believe that in doing so, we can break new ground in our understanding of the evolution of cognition as well as gain a much better understanding of animal behaviour.

Animal Behavior and Cognition↗

bioRxiv2022

Fractionated brain irradiation profoundly reduces hippocampal immature neuron numbers without affecting spontaneous behavior and cognition in mice

Whole brain radiotherapy (WBRT) is used to treat patients with primary brain tumors, or brain metastasis from various primary tumors to improve tumor control. However, WBRT can lead to cognitive decline. We treated mice with fractionated WBRT (fWBRT) to establish a model system to study the mechanisms underlying cognitive decline. Besides a series of traditional cognitive tests, we also assessed the effect on spontaneous behavior as measured in automated home cages. Male C57Bl/6j mice (n=11 per group) received bi-lateral fWBRT at a dosage of 4 Gy/day on 5 consecutive days. In line with previous reports, immunohistochemical analysis of doublecortin (DCX) positive cells in the dentate gyrus showed a profound reduction in immature neurons at 4 weeks after fWBRT. Surprisingly, spontaneous behavior as measured in automated home cages was not affected. Moreover, learning and memory measured with traditional tasks - including the novel object recognition task, novel location recognition task, Barnes maze, and fear conditioning - was also not affected at 4-6 weeks after fWBRT. At 10-11 weeks after fWBRT a difference in escape latency during the learning phase, but not in the probe phase of the Barnes maze was observed. In conclusion, although we confirmed the effect of fWBRT on neurogenesis at 4 weeks after fWBRT, we did not find clear effects on spontaneous behavior in the automated home cage nor on learning abilities as measured by traditional cognitive tasks. The relationship between the neurobiological effects of fWBRT and cognition seems more complex than often assumed and the choice of animal model, cognitive tasks, neurobiological parameters, and experimental set-up might be important factors in these types of experiments.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2020

Brain size predicts learning abilities in bees

A large brain is widely considered a distinctive feature of intelligence, a notion that mostly derives from studies in mammals. However, studies in insects demonstrates that cognitively sophisticated processes, such as social learning and tool use, are still possible with very small brains. Even after accounting for the allometric effect of body size, substantial variation in brain size still remains unexplained. A plausible advantage of a disproportionately larger brain might be an enhanced ability to learn new behaviors to cope with novel or complex challenges. While this hypothesis has received ample support from studies in birds and mammals, similar evidence is not available for small-brained animals like insects. Our objective is to compare the learning abilities of different bee species with their brain size investment. We conducted an experiment in which field-collected individuals had to associate an unconditioned stimulus (sucrose), with a conditioned stimulus (colored strip). We show that the probability of learning the reward-colour association was related to both absolute and relative brain size. This study shows that other bee species aside from the long studied honeybees and bumblebees, can be used in cognitive experiments and opens the door to explore the importance of relative brain sizes in cognitive tasks for insects and its consequences for species survival in a changing world.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2021

Increasing Animal Cognition Research in Zoos

Animal cognition covers various mental processes including perception, learning, decision-making and memory, and animal behavior is often used as a proxy for measuring cognition. Animal cognition/behavior research has multiple benefits; it provides fundamental knowledge on animal biology and evolution but can also have applied conservation and welfare applications. Zoos provide an excellent yet relatively untapped resource for animal cognition research, because they house a wide variety of species - many of which are under threat - and allow close observation and relatively high experimental control compared to the wild. Multi-zoo collaboration leads to increased sample size and species representation, which in turn leads to more robust science. However, there are salient challenges associated with zoo-based cognitive research, which are subject-based (e.g., small sample sizes at single zoos, untrained/unhabituated subjects, site effects) and human-based (e.g., time restrictions, safety concerns, and perceptions of animals interacting with unnatural technology or apparatus). We aim to increase the understanding and subsequent uptake of animal cognition research in zoos, by transparently outlining the main benefits and challenges. Importantly, we use our own research (1) a study on novelty responses in hornbills, and (2) a multi-site collaboration called the ManyBirds project to demonstrate how challenges may be overcome. These potential options include using drop and go apparatuses that require no training, close human contact or animal separation. This article is aimed at zoo animal care and research staff, as well as external researchers interested in zoo-based studies. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTSO_LIZoos are an excellent yet relatively untapped resource for animal cognition research. C_LIO_LIZoo cognition research has historically been challenging, and traditional laboratory paradigms often do not translate well to the majority of zoos. C_LIO_LISalient challenges of zoo-based cognitive research can be overcome by using less restrictive test apparatuses, limiting animal training and isolation, and subscribing to multi-zoo collaborative programs. C_LI

scientific communication and education↗