Selection of Mice for Object Permanence Cognitive Task Solution

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper concerns  Selection of mice for object permanence cognitive task solution

it is well written and contains 6 high resolution figures 

the authors applied water maze and measured the mice body weight 

Mice of “plus” strain ate more new food (cheese), than “minus” animals and more 220 cheese than mice of the control non-selected genetically  heterogeneous population 

the ethics approval is included and references are ok. 

conflict of interest statement also given thus the paper can be accepted for publication thank u

Author Response

We wish to express our gratitude to the  respected reviewer for the positive evaluation of this paper. Authors O. Perepelkina and I .Poletaeva

Reviewer 2 Report

This manuscript's presentation approach, writing style, and literature are poorly applied from an academic standpoint and are extremely subpar. I strongly advise the authors to rethink how they would write up this manuscript. The writing style is unclear. The introduction and abstract are ambiguous. I expected distinct parts of the results and discussion. They merged them together. The Figures are of terrible quality.

For the time being, I am unable to accept this work, thus I advise the authors to revise their presentation and writing style before resubmitting it.

Author Response

Dear respected Reviewer 2! We are sorry that our article is not in accordance to Your high requirements. Although, we made several changes in the manuscript – in the text of Abstract and Introduction and tried to make our ideas more clear. We divided (according to Your opinion) the RESULTS and DISCUSSION section into two. We also improved the quality of figures.

Reviewer 3 Report

I have found this work very interesting; it is clearly organized in a logical way. The literature review used contains relevant which gives more value to this work.

The article discusses an important topic of behavioral study related to the test of puzzle box that evaluates the success in finding the underpass leading to 6 dark parts of the box, The present paper describes the results of experiment in which mice were selected during five generations for high and low scores of the puzzle-box test solution, The proportions of animals solving the “plug” stages were higher in mice of the “+”, than in “-”and in non-selected population.Selecting changed the mouse's ability to open the hidden underpass.

The paper is generally well written and structured,the manuscript clear, relevant for the field and presented in a well-structured manner, the methodsare adequately described and the results provide an advancement of the current knowledge.However, in my opinion, the paper has some shortcomings in regards to some paragraphs, and needed some figures to be more explicit.

Below I have provided numerous remarks on the text. 

-       the references mentioned are mostly old (20% of the references are recent)

-       the quality of the figures needs to be reviewed

-       the article needs a real image of the puzzle box instead of an explanatory drawing

Author Response

The reply to Reviewer 3.

We would like to thank you for the appreciation of our efforts! We improved the quality of figures and we introduced the photo of the underpass of the experimental box with a mouse nearby (in order the dimensions of both could be compared).

As for “aged” citation list – it is not possible to cite the hundreds of modern investigations which point to different genes (as parts of numerous signaling cascades) in which the complicated learning habits are distorted  (or improved) due to genotype changes.  The topic of our article is in a way “old fashioned”, although we think that it is a pity – this issue looks important and promising. The search in the data bases did not bring significantly new information concerning elementary logic problems solutions and/or respective genetic approaches. We found only one 2021 article concerning object permanence in ungulates (which was introduced in the discussion section). The previous experience with the reviewers made it necessary to include the old citations of Tryon and al., as they are the reference points to selection experiments in the behavior genetics field.” We ho[pe that these changes improve the article. O. Perepelkina, I.Poletaeva

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Authors modification is aproved