Our understanding of consistent individual differences in behaviour — or ‘traits’ — in non-human species is limited. Forkosh et al. placed 168 mice in groups of 4 in ‘social boxes’ and used automatic location tracking to record each animal’s behaviour over 4 days. They used a linear discriminant analysis of 60 behavioural dimensions to identify four ‘identity domains’ (IDs) with high between-individual discriminative ability and high within-individual stability over time, even when mice were placed in different groups. ID scores correlated with scores on multiple behavioural assays and with transcriptomic variance in certain brain regions.
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Forkosh, O. et al. Identity domains capture individual differences from across the behavioral repertoire. Nat. Neurosci. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-019-0516-y (2019)
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Bray, N. A measure of mouse traits. Nat Rev Neurosci 21, 3 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-019-0247-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-019-0247-9