The existence and consistency of individual behavioral types in response to challenging situations is of increasing interest in behavioral biology. In our study on European rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus), we (1) investigated correlations between social behavior during early development and responses to experimental stressors during later life, and (2) tested for consistencies in these response...

Zebrafish possess three classes of chromatophores that include iridophores, melanophores, and xanthophores. Mutations that lack one or two classes of chromatophores have been isolated or genetically constructed. Using a behavioral assay based on visually mediated escape responses, we measured the visual response of fully and partially pigmented zebrafish. In zebrafish that lack iridophores (roy...

Recent progress in the experimental design for event-related fMRI experiments made it possible to find the optimal stimulus sequence for maximum contrast detection power using a genetic algorithm. In this study, a novel algorithm is proposed for optimization of contrast detection power by including probabilistic behavioral information, based on pilot data, in the genetic algorithm. As a particu...

Grapheme-color synesthetes experience specific colors associated with specific number or letter characters. To determine the neural locus of this condition, we compared behavioral and fMRI responses in six grapheme-color synesthetes to control subjects. In our behavioral experiments, we found that a subject's synesthetic experience can aid in texture segregation (experiment 1) and reduce the ef...

The present study investigated the neural responses to errors in a shooting game - and how these neural responses may relate to behavioral performance - by examining the ERP components related to error detection (error-related negativity; ERN) and error awareness (error-related positivity; Pe). The participants completed a Shooter go/no-go task, which required them to shoot at armed targets usi...

BACKGROUND Among the Aristotelian senses, the subcellular and molecular mechanisms involved in the sense of touch are the most poorly understood. RESULTS We demonstrate that specialized sensory neurons, the class II and class III multidendritic (md) neurons, are gentle touch sensors of Drosophila larvae. Genetic silencing of these cells significantly impairs gentle touch responses, optogeneti...

Drawing upon the coping theory and the stimulusorganism-response (S-O-R) model, this paper proposes a research model to understand consumers’ behavioral responses toward online ads. We posit that a combination of primary appraisals (perceived gain/loss) and secondary appraisals (perceived control) of ads’ design features influences consumers’ emotional states (positive affect vs. negative affec...

Behaviors that minimize exposure to sources of pathogens can carry opportunity costs. Consequently, how individuals resolve the tradeoff between the benefits and costs of behavioral immune responses should be sensitive to the extent to which they are vulnerable to infectious diseases. However, although it is a strong prediction of this functional flexibility principle, there is little compellin...