Advancing and Integrating the Cusp Concept to Understand Behavioral Repertoire Dynamics.

The behavioral repertoire grows and develops through a lifetime in a manner intricately dependent on bidirectional connections between its current form and the shaping environment. Behavior analysis has discovered many of the key relationships that occur between repertoire elements that govern this constant metamorphosis, including the behavioral cusp: an event that triggers contact with new behavioral contingencies. The current literature already suggests possible integration of the behavioral cusp and related concepts into a wider understanding of behavioural development and cumulative learning.

Gathering Self-Initiated Rat Behavioral Data to Characterize Post-Stroke Deficits.

Behavioral testing in rat models is frequently utilized for diverse purposes, including psychological, biomedical, and behavioral research. Many traditional approaches involve individual, one-on-one testing sessions between a single researcher and each animal in an experiment. This setup can be very time consuming for the researcher, and their presence may impact the behavioral data in unwanted ways.

Using Operant Reach Chambers to Assess Mouse Skilled Forelimb Use After Stroke.

Skilled forelimb reaching and grasping are important components of rodent motor performance. The isometric pull task can serve as a tool for quantifying forelimb function following stroke or other CNS injury as well as in forelimb rehabilitation. This task has been extensively developed for use in rats.

An apparatus for automatically training and collecting individualized behavioral data with socially housed rodents.

Background: Conventional methods for individually housing, training, and testing rodents in behavioral assays can impose constraints that may limit some kinds of experimental external validity, preempt environmental enrichment, impose heavy experimenter time burdens that limit high-throughput data collection, and negatively impact animal welfare.

New Method: To address these issues, we created a simple apparatus for automatically collecting individually identified data with rodents in social and/or enriched housing.

Results: We validated this "One Rat Turnstyle" (ORT) apparatus by utilizing it to automatically teach socially housed rats to individually press a lever without experimenter intervention or shaping.

Forelimb Cortical Stroke Reduces Precision of Motor Control in Mice.

. Rodent models of stroke impairment should capture translatable features of behavioral injury. This study characterized poststroke impairment of motor precision separately from strength in an automated behavioral assay.

Closed-loop neuromodulation restores network connectivity and motor control after spinal cord injury.

Recovery from serious neurological injury requires substantial rewiring of neural circuits. Precisely-timed electrical stimulation could be used to restore corrective feedback mechanisms and promote adaptive plasticity after neurological insult, such as spinal cord injury (SCI) or stroke. This study provides the first evidence that closed-loop vagus nerve stimulation (CLV) based on the synaptic eligibility trace leads to dramatic recovery from the most common forms of SCI.

The flight of the locus of selection: Some intricate relationships between evolutionary elements.

Selection has enriched our understanding of the world since it was first applied to the evolution of species. Selection stands as an alternative to essentialist thinking, as a generalized and multiply applicable concept, and as a causal explanation for current forms within biology and behavior. Attempts to describe selection processes in a generalizable way have provided clarity about their minimal elements, such as replicators and interactors.

An automated task for the training and assessment of distal forelimb function in a mouse model of ischemic stroke.

Background: Behavioral models relevant to stroke research seek to capture important aspects of motor skills typically impaired in human patients, such as coordination of distal musculature. Such models may focus on mice since many genetic tools are available for use only in that species and since the training and behavioral demands of mice can differ from rats even for superficially similar behavioral readouts. However, current mouse assays are time consuming to train and score, especially in a manner producing continuous quantification.