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The article presents information on the symposium, "Infant Mouse and Rat Ultrasonic Vocalizations" that was held on June 27th, 2003 at the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Behavior Genetics Association in Chicago, Illinois. To accomplish integration, each author submitted an initial draft and the set of those drafts was sent to each author who was encouraged to refer to other papers in the issue when those works were relevant to his or her own. Thus, the reader will notice that in many cases, authors "speak to each other" in their papers. In the first paper, Mathias Kölliker sets the stage for discussions of rodent ultrasonic calls and parental responses by placing the interactions among parents and offspring in an evolutionary context.

The diallel cross genetic design was employed to determine the pattern of inheritance of male--male agonistic behavior in laboratory mice. The results indicated strong strain differences in agonistic behaviors and strain ranks that replicated previous findings. The genetic analysis showed the presence of additive and nondirectional dominance effects on the behaviors measured. This pattern has been characterized as indicating the action of stabilizing selection and indicates that the trait has not been under directional selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brain growth was studied from day of birth through 23 days of age in three outbred and one inbred groups of mice. The results showed that the brain grows rapidly from Birth through 11 days and quite slowly thereafter. We found no evidence of the several spurts and plateaus in growth that are central to the theory of phrenoblysis (correlated brain and mind growth). Our results show the main features of mouse brain growth to parallel those of human brain growth except for timing of rapid and slow growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]