The medial preoptic area (mPOA) differs between males and females in nearly all species examined to date, including humans. Here, using fiber photometry recordings of Ca2+ transients in freely behaving mice, we show ramping activities in the mPOA that precede and correlate with sexually dimorphic display of male-typical mounting and female-typical pup retrieval. Strikingly, optogenetic stimulation of the mPOA elicits similar display of mounting and pup retrieval in both males and females. Furthermore, by means of recording, ablation, optogenetic activation, and inhibition, we show mPOA neurons expressing estrogen receptor alpha (Esr1) are essential for the sexually biased display of these behaviors. Together, these results underscore the shared layout of the brain that can mediate sex-specific behaviors in both male and female mice and provide an important functional frame to decode neural mechanisms governing sexually dimorphic behaviors in the future.

Medial preoptic area in mice is capable of mediating sexually dimorphic behaviors regardless of gender.

Neural Evolution of Context-Dependent Fly Song

Two Brain Pathways Initiate Distinct Forward Walking Programs in Drosophila

A Single-Neuron Chemosensory Switch Determines the Valence of a Sexually Dimorphic Sensory Behavior

Aggressive social interactions are used to compete for limited resources and are regulated by complex sensory cues and the organism's internal state. While both sexes exhibit aggression, its neuronal underpinnings are understudied in females. Here, we identify a population of sexually dimorphic aIPg neurons in the adult Drosophila melanogaster central brain whose optogenetic activation increased, and genetic inactivation reduced, female aggression. Analysis of GAL4 lines identified in an unbiased screen for increased female chasing behavior revealed the involvement of another sexually dimorphic neuron, pC1d, and implicated aIPg and pC1d neurons as core nodes regulating female aggression. Connectomic analysis demonstrated that aIPg neurons and pC1d are interconnected and suggest that aIPg neurons may exert part of their effect by gating the flow of visual information to descending neurons. Our work reveals important regulatory components of the neuronal circuitry that underlies female aggressive social interactions and provides tools for their manipulation.

Cell types and neuronal circuitry underlying female aggression in Drosophila

Activation of Latent Courtship Circuitry in the Brain of Drosophila Females Induces Male-like Behaviors

Perceptions and reactions to conversational privacy initiated by a conversational user interface

Error messages are frequent in interactions with Conversational User Interfaces (CUI). Smart speakers respond to about every third user request with an error message. Errors can heavily affect user experience (UX) in interaction with CUI. However, there is limited research on how error responses should be formulated. In this paper, we present a system to study how people classify different categories (acknowledgement of user sentiment, acknowledgement of error and apology) of error messages, and evaluate peoples' preference of error responses with clear categories. The results indicate that if an error response has only one element (i.e. neutral acknowledgement of error, apology or sentiment), responses that acknowledge errors neutrally are preferred by participants. Moreover, we find that when interviewed, participants like error messages to include an apology, an explanation of what went wrong, and a suggestion how to fix the problem in addition to a neutral acknowledgement of an error. Our study has two main contributions: (1) our results inform about the design of error messages and (2) we present a framework for error response categorization and validation.

User Preference and Categories for Error Responses in Conversational User Interfaces

We evaluate the user experience (UX) of Amazon's Alexa when users play and control music. For measuring UX we use established UX metrics (SASSI, SUISQ-R, SUS, AttrakDiff). We investigated face validity by asking users to rate how well they think a questionnaire measures what it is supposed to measure and we assessed construct validity by correlating UX scores of questionnaires with each other. We find a mismatch between face and construct validity of the evaluated questionnaires. Specifically, users feel that SASSI represents their experience better than other questionnaires, however this is not supported by correlations between questionnaires, which suggest that all investigated questionnaires measure UX to a similar extent. Importantly, the fact that face validity and construct validity diverge is not surprising as this has been observed before. Our work adds to existing literature by providing face and construct validity scores of UX questionnaires for interactions with the common speech assistant Alexa.

User Experience of Alexa when controlling music: comparison of face and construct validity of four questionnaires

Courtship in Drosophila is used already to screen genes linked to memory-deficiency and neurodegeneration in humans. However the research community does not understand the mechanism which gives rise to courtship patterns. When a male fly encounters a female fly, he starts to follow her, licks her genitalia, sings a courtship song and eventually bends his abdomen to reach her genitalia [1]. Male courtship in Drosophila is overt, easily quantifiable, and occurs without any prior experience.

Birgit Brüggemeier

Papers

Activation of Latent Courtship Circuitry in the Brain of Drosophila Females Induces Male-like Behaviors

Perceptions and reactions to conversational privacy initiated by a conversational user interface

User Preference and Categories for Error Responses in Conversational User Interfaces

User Experience of Alexa when controlling music: comparison of face and construct validity of four questionnaires

Improving the utility of Drosophila melanogaster for neurodegenerative disease research by modelling courtship behaviour patterns