Visual Field Analysis: A reliable method to score left and right eye use using automated tracking

Brain and behavioural asymmetries have been documented in various taxa. Many of these asymmetries involve preferential left and right eye use. However, measuring eye use through manual frame-by-frame analyses from video recordings is laborious and may lead to biases. Recent progress in technology has allowed the development of accurate tracking techniques for measuring animal behaviour. Amongst these techniques, DeepLabCut, a Python-based tracking toolbox using transfer learning with deep neural networks, offers the possibility to track different body parts with unprecedented accuracy. Exploiting the potentialities of DeepLabCut, we developed Visual Field Analysis, an additional open-source application for extracting eye use data. To our knowledge, this is the first application that can automatically quantify left–right preferences in eye use. Here we test the performance of our application in measuring preferential eye use in young domestic chicks. The comparison with manual scoring methods revealed a near perfect correlation in the measures of eye use obtained by Visual Field Analysis. With our application, eye use can be analysed reliably, objectively and at a fine scale in different experimental paradigms

Embryonic Exposure to Valproic Acid Impairs Social Predispositions of Newly-Hatched Chicks

This work was supported by a grant from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) Grant ERC-2011-ADG_20110406, Project No: 461 295517, PREMESOR to G.V. Support from Fondazione Caritro Grant Biomarker DSA [40102839] and PRIN 2015 (Neural bases of animacy detection, and their relevance to the typical and atypical development of the brain) to GV is also acknowledged

Naïve chicks do not prefer objects with stable body orientation, though they may prefer behavioural variability

Domestic chicks (Gallus gallus domesticus) have been widely used as a model to study the motion cues that allow visually naïve organisms to detect animate agents shortly after hatching/birth. Our previous work has shown that chicks prefer to approach agents whose main body axis and motion direction are aligned (a feature typical of creatures whose motion is constrained by a bilaterally symmetric body plan). However, it has never been investigated whether chicks are also sensitive to the fact that an agent maintains a stable front–back body orientation in motion (i.e. consistency in which end is leading and which trailing). This is another feature typical of bilateria, which is also associated with the detection of animate agents in humans. The aim of the present study was to fll this gap. Contrary to our initial expectations, after testing 300 chicks across 3 experimental conditions, we found a recurrent preference for the agent which did not maintain a stable front–back body orientation. Since this preference was limited to female chicks, the results are discussed also in relation to sex diferences in the social behaviour of this model. Overall, we show for the frst time that chicks can discriminate agents based on the stability of their front–back orientation. The unexpected direction of the efect could refect a preference for agents’ whose behaviour is less predictable. Chicks may prefer agents with greater behavioural variability, a trait which has been associated with animate agents, or have a tendency to explore agents performing “odd behaviours”

Spontaneous Learning of Visual Structures in Domestic Chicks

Effective communication crucially depends on the ability to produce and recognize structured signals, as apparent in language and birdsong. Although it is not clear to what extent similar syntactic-like abilities can be identified in other animals, recently we reported that domestic chicks can learn abstract visual patterns and the statistical structure defined by a temporal sequence of visual shapes. However, little is known about chicks’ ability to process spatial/positional information from visual configurations. Here, we used filial imprinting as an unsupervised learning mechanism to study spontaneous encoding of the structure of a configuration of different shapes. After being exposed to a triplet of shapes (ABC or CAB), chicks could discriminate those triplets from a permutation of the same shapes in different order (CAB or ABC), revealing a sensitivity to the spatial arrangement of the elements. When tested with a fragment taken from the imprinting triplet that followed the familiar adjacency-relationships (AB or BC) vs. one in which the shapes maintained their position with respect to the stimulus edges (AC), chicks revealed a preference for the configuration with familiar edge elements, showing an edge bias previously found only with temporal sequences

Violencia familiar y regulación emocional en adolescentes, de una institución educativa del Distrito de Chorrillos, Lima

La presente investigación tuvo como objetivo determinar la correlación entre Violencia Familiar y Regulación Emocional en adolescentes de secundaria de un colegio estatal de Chorrillos, 2022. El enfoque del estudio es cuantitativo, de tipo descriptivo, no experimental de corte transversal, de diseño correlacional, La población de estudio fue de 263 estudiantes, entre hombres y mujeres, obtenido con muestreo no probabilístico. Los instrumentos utilizados fueron el cuestionario de Violencia hacia los adolescentes (EVA), y la Escala de Regulación Emocional (ERQ) Se utilizó además el clásico programa de estadística SPSS para la obtención de los resultados. Asimismo, los resultados señalaron que si existe relación entre la violencia familiar y la regulación emocional. Se concluye que se acepta la hipótesis general, señalando que si existe relación entre la violencia familiar y la regulación emocional (rs = -.302), debido a que el valor hallado es significativo (p = < .001)

Cerebral and Behavioural Asymmetries in Animal Social Recognition

Evidence is here summarized that animal species belonging to distant taxa show forms of social recognition, a sophisticated cognitive ability adaptive in most social interactions. The paper then proceeds to review evidence of functional lateralization for this cognitive ability. The main focus of this review is evidence obtained in domestic chickens, the animal model employed in the authors' laboratories, but we also discuss comparisons with data from species ranging from fishes, amphib ians and reptiles, to other birds and mammals. A consistent pattern emerges, pointing toward a right hemisphere dominance, in particular for discrimination of social companions and individual (or familiarity-based) recognition, whereas the left hemisphere could be specialized for "category-based" distinctions (e.g., conspecifics versus heterospecifics). This pattern of results is discussed in relation to a more general specialization and processing styles of the two sides of the brain, with the right hemisphere predisposed for developing a detailed, global and contextual representation of objects, and the left hemisphere predisposed for rapid assignment of a stimulus to a category, for processing releaser stimuli and for control of responses