Topic: neophobia

In various situations, individuals can display different attitudes towards novelty. Sometimes individuals gravitate towards novelty while other times they avoid it. This is referred to as neophilia and neophobia respectively. Understanding these opposing attitudes towards novelty can elucidate various aspects of life, like adaptive behavior, memory, and anxiety, but first there need to be reliable paradigms. Recently, attention has been directed toward establishing such paradigms in birds. We administered two tasks assessing neophilia and neophobia in pigeons to measure both behaviors in the s

Absence seizures (ASs) are brief periods of lack of consciousness, characterized by 2.5-4 Hz spike-wave discharges in the thalamocortical network in the EEG. Together with ASs, 60% of children with ASs show neuropsychological comorbidities, including cognitive and mood impairments, that can be present before the epilepsy diagnosis and even after the seizures are pharmacologically controlled. Since cognitive alteration may be subtle and task-specific, their presence may be confounded by an anxiety-like phenotype, and no study has tested anxiety and memory in the same animal model of ASs. Using