Topic: Infant-oriented motor actions

Naturalistic behaviors in mammals are triggered by specific sensory cues and strongly influenced by internal states such as hormonal levels. Infant-oriented motor actions in maternal mice are enabled by sensory stimuli from the pups (such as vocalizations, somatic touch). Some maternal behaviors, like nursing and searching for isolated pups outside of the nest, further depend on the release of the hypothalamic neurohormone oxytocin (Menon & Neumann, 2023). However, pup stimuli are often aversive to virgin females (Lecca et al., 2023; Schiavo et al., 2020), who also exhibit different patter