Chinese red panda (Ailurus styani) has stable individual-level laterality of anogenital rubbing

Behavioural laterality was widely discovered in both vertebrates and invertebrates. However, reports of behavioural laterality in scent-marking are scarce and focused on limb preference during scent-marking. In this study, we observed another scent-marking behaviour, anogenital rubbing, which involved whole-body movement, in zoo-housed Chinese red pandas. We recorded the moving direction of the buttocks when initiating anogenital rubbing. Our results showed that three of our subjects were explicitly left-biased when initiating anogenital rubbing and the other one showed more left initiation although there was no statistical significance. Besides, the laterality was consistent across the whole observational period. This is the first report of laterality in anogenital rubbing, perhaps indicating hemispheric specialization for chemical communication in the Chinese red panda.

Transcranial direct current stimulation does not improve performance in a whole-body movement task

Research has investigated the use of non-invasive brain interventions, such as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), to enhance motor learning and rehabilitation. Much research has shown that tDCS improves motor learning and that bilateral tDCS is more beneficial than unilateral tDCS in improving motor learning. However, past research has primarily utilised simple motor tasks in measuring motor skill learning. These are not ecologically reliable as whole-body movement is required for everyday activities. This study involved two experiments. Each experiment involved participants learning 12 Ballroom and Latin dance moves whilst undergoing tDCS. All participants underwent three sessions of tDCS, (unilateral, bilateral and sham), over three consecutive days. Participants in the first experiment (n=30) had stimulation to the primary motor cortex (PMC) and those in the second experiment (n=31) had stimulation to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). In each experiment, a baseline was taken before the training sessions and two outcome measures were taken; a day after the last training session and two weeks later. In each testing session participants’ dance ability was measured. Our results showed that bilateral tDCS impaired performance in both experiments. Unilateral stimulation impaired performance in the first experiment, and did not significantly improve performance any better than the sham stimulation in the second experiment. These results suggest that task complexity plays a crucial role when tDCS procedures are used to modulate motor performance and highlights possible limitations of tDCS in practice.

Intermuscular coherence between homologous muscles during dynamic and static movement periods of bipedal squatting

It is largely unexplored how the central nervous system achieves coordination of homologous muscles of the upper and lower body within a compound whole body movement, and to what extent this neural drive is modulated between different movement periods and muscles. Using intermuscular coherence analysis, we show that homologous muscle functions are mediated through common oscillatory input that extends over alpha, beta, and gamma frequencies with different synchronization patterns at different movement periods.