Topic: behavioral trajectories

Maternal care is essential for infant survival across mammalian species. In rodents, a classical maternal behavior, retrieving astray pups back to the nest (“pup retrieval”), is broadly expressed by mothers, even those with no previous experience (e.g., primiparous mothers), suggesting that this behavior emerges through hard-wired neural mechanisms that are activated during motherhood. However, sexually- and pup-naïve female mice (virgins) are also able to perform this behavior if exposed to mothers and their litter, insinuating that there is a learning component to this behavior that is indep