Drosophila melanogaster is a powerful model organism to understand the neural and molecular mechanisms underlying learning and memory. However, memory is usually studied by assessing choice behavior a...

limited contract

Several instances of short-term plasticity of reproductive behaviors are known to modulate interactions among competing individuals. Habituation and sensitization processes result in decrements and in...

ALT: Graceful Deer Hopping at Sunset

Job Description The Department of Biological Sciences in the College of Science at Virginia Tech seeks applicants for two (2) tenure-track research and teaching positions at the Assistant/Associate ...

Tufts University is hiring a Senior Research Technician, Metabolism and Basic Biology of Aging in Boston, Massachusetts. Review all of the job details and apply today!

An updated phylogeny of bats is presented, based on new genome assemblies and many ancient fossils and including all known bat families.

ECR Spotlight is a series of interviews with early-career authors from a selection of papers published in Journal of Experimental Biology and aims to promote not only the diversity of early-career res...

Humans can flexibly acquire entirely new sensorimotor mappings, a process known as de novo motor learning. A central challenge in de novo motor learning is that the learner must discover a viable solution from scratch within a highly redundant control space, without predefined task constraints. Understanding what types of sensorimotor information contribute to the formation of accurate motor behavior in such situations is therefore critical for explaining how novel sensorimotor skills are acquired. While previous studies have suggested that novel visuomotor mappings can be formed based on movement direction and target position, it remains unclear how these two types of information contribute to the learning process. To address this question, we trained 25 human participants (13 males and 12 females) to learn arbitrary joystick-to-cursor mapping. We then employed a generalization paradigm to selectively restrict learning experience to either movement direction or target position. Three distinct target conditions were designed: one emphasized target position (P), another emphasized movement direction (D), and a third (P&D) encouraged learning of both components separately. Results showed direction experience reduced initial direction error, whereas the lack of position experience was associated with increased final position error. However, in the P&D condition, combining these experiences did not yield additive generalization. Instead, endpoint accuracy was positively correlated with the alignment between direction- and position-based outputs in the redundant control space. These results suggest that accurate formation of a novel sensorimotor map depends on the coordinated use of directional and positional experiences.

Communication is a natural social behavior that influences reproduction and survival; consequently, central questions in neuroethology involve discove…

Persistent avoidance plays a major role in maintaining anxiety disorders. The few studies that have explored the neural basis of avoidance have predominantly examined established avoidance behaviors rather than the learning processes that establish avoidance responses. We aimed to characterize the temporal dynamics and neural mechanisms of avoidance learning using a novel paradigm combined with 7 tesla fMRI in 82 healthy participants (37 male and 45 female). Participants were first conditioned to two threat stimuli and a compound safety stimulus. Next, they were trained to avoid one threat stimulus while the other remained unavoidable. Behavioral data confirmed accurate learning of task contingencies. Successful avoidance was associated with prominent activation of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex compared with unsuccessful avoidance, with additional nucleus accumbens and orbitofrontal cortex engagement when compared with safety learning ( P FDR whole-brain corrected). Critically, early compared with late avoidance learning was distinctly associated with activation of midbrain-striatal circuits, including the periaqueductal gray (PAG), mediodorsal thalamus, substantia nigra, and anterior insular cortex—regions associated with threat processing and learning-related signaling. These findings suggest that initial avoidance learning relies on subcortical threat-responsive and learning-related circuits, whereas established avoidance responses engage cortical safety-processing regions. This dissociation parallels recent findings in safety learning and provides novel mechanistic insights for interventions targeting maladaptive avoidance patterns.

We reared and recorded behaviours of clonal Amazon mollies in standardized environments, with and without predation stress, from birth through week four of life, to understand how the developmental e...

I use birdsong to understand how the brain learns complex skills across molecules, synapses, circuits, behavior, and computation. On the 2026–27 faculty job market.

Brains rely on internal models of the world to interpret sensory input and to simulate the future. In the mammalian hippocampal-entorhinal network, environments are represented by cognitive maps that ...

Connectomics, electrophysiology and modelling of electric fish neural circuits shows how distributed synaptic plasticity across multiple network layers cooperates to enable fast, accurate and noi...

Bilaterian animals must integrate sensory input from both sides of their bodies to make coherent perceptual decisions. In Drosophila larvae, olfactory receptor neurons target the ipsilateral brain hem...

Ovenbirds, electric fish, tree frogs and other regional fauna help neuroscientists ask novel research questions in the field.

University of Debreceni - Department of Evolutionary Zoology and Humanbiology

Restudy of a challenging fossil using cross-polarized light imaging and phylogenetic reconstruction identifies Chosha praecursor, a probable early-diverging insect, helping to bridge the longstanding ...

Collective behaviour is widespread in the animal kingdom and can enhance individual fitness. Yet not all collective behaviours are adaptations. Instead, some may be nonadaptive or ‘evolutionary spandrels’—traits that originated as by-products in the sense proposed by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin. Here, we argue that self-organising processes provide a route through which evolutionary spandrels in collective animal behaviour can occur, and we provide three examples: spatial organisation in primate groups, division of labour in ants, and insect chorusing. We then consider how such outcomes may be co-opted into adaptive roles through exaptation and conclude by outlining the challenges associated with testing adaptive and nonadaptive hypotheses in collective behaviour research using individual-based studies, phylogenetic comparative analyses, and agent-based models.

Sciencesconf.org

What does The Edge of Sentience tell us about insect sentience and consciousness? In this commentary, we reflect on Jonathan Birch’s framework for defining and scientifically investigating sentience i...