Behavioral Research Blog

IR backlight in rodent behavioral testing

How do mice act in complete darkness? Ann-Kristina Fritz and her colleagues ordered a large, round open field with IR backlight, custom made by Noldus, to investigate.

The emotions of people who think they’re nice

What does ‘nice’ actually mean in relation to psychological variables? And does it positively correlate with self-reported levels of health, happiness, and wellbeing?

Emotions distract people with eating disorders

Studies show that people with anorexia nervosa have reduced facial expressivity of emotions while viewing emotionally provoking stimuli. Researcher Leppanen and her team used FaceReader to investigate this.

Brain & behavior: data integration in horse studies

EEG recordings – they produce useful data, but are not always easy to obtain in animal studies. You can’t really ask a horse to sit still, so these researchers invented a promising new system for EEG recording.

Behavioral tests to select police horses

The personality of police horses influences how well they do in their ‘job’. That’s why personality tests are important for both animal and human welfare and safety.

Interview skills training for adolescents with language disorder examined

The study of Mathrick and colleagues evaluated an interview skills training package targeting both verbal and non-verbal skills for adolescents with severe and persistent Language Disorders.

Gait recovery and other effects: treatment of cervical myelopathy

At the Dr. Michael Fehlings' lab, they are on a quest to find out what exactly causes the lower success rate of delayed surgery in cervical myelopathy.

The impact of sounds on autistic children’s behaviors

Children with autism can have trouble dealing with external distractions. Researcher Shireen Kanakri conducted a study to observe the impact of the acoustic environment on restrictive and repetitive behaviors.

Video tracking makes bird watching much easier

Everyone with children knows the phenomenon that what is good for a child is not always the best for a parent. The same counts for birds.

Measuring parent-infant behavior from another point of view

Parent-child interaction is an important focus of child development research. Lee’s research team compared recordings of play behavior from both a traditional third-person point of view, and through the babies' eyes.

Ticking clocks – tides and activity peaks in American horseshoe crabs

Recently, I came across an interesting paper in which American horseshoe crabs were video-tracked to investigate their internal clocks.

Flower preference in solitary bees

Mason bees are fascinating and friendly creatures. Tibor Bukovinszky and his colleagues investigated how their foraging behavior affects their offspring.