Quantifying behavior to solve sensorimotor transformations: advances from worms and flies

Calhoun, Adam J.; Murthy, Mala

doi:10.1016/j.conb.2017.08.006

Cited by 49 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 92 publications

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“…At the same time that we are learning more about how animals behave, physical ethology is being connected to other disciplines. In neuroscience, there is an increasing awareness that deep understanding of behaviour may be needed to understand brain-scale neural recordings [77][78][79] . In genetics, efforts to improve the characterisation of phenotypes have focused primarily on morphology but would benefit from improvements in behavioural quantification as well 80 .…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethology as a physical science

2018

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Behaviour is the ultimate output of an animal's nervous system and choosing the right action at the right time can be critical for survival. A quantitative understanding of behaviour would therefore advance research in neuroscience as well as ecology and evolution. However, animal posture typically has many degrees of freedom and behavioural dynamics vary on timescales ranging from milliseconds to years, presenting both technical and conceptual challenges. Here we review 1) advances in imaging and computer vision that are making it possible to capture increasingly complete records of animal motion and 2) new approaches to understanding the resulting behavioural data sets. With the right analytical approaches, these data are allowing researchers to revisit longstanding questions about the structure and organisation of animal behaviour and to put unifying principles on a quantitative footing. Contributions from both experimentalists and theorists are leading to the emergence of a physics of behaviour and the prospect of discovering laws and developing theories with broad applicability. We believe that there now exists an opportunity to develop theories of behaviour which can be tested using these data sets leading to a deeper understanding of how and why animals behave.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethology as a physical science

2018

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“…For example, we are more likely to make correct choices when attending versus when distracted, and will consume food when hungry but suppress eating when sated. A number of studies in animals highlight that the nervous system encodes these context-dependent effects by remodeling sensorimotor activity at every level, from sensory processing, to decision-making, all the way to motor activity [1, 2, 6, 10, 14, 25, 43]. For instance, recordings from rodent cortical neurons reveal that neural activity can be more strongly correlated with the state of locomotion versus the statistics of sensory stimuli during sensory-driven tasks [50, 62].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unsupervised identification of the internal states that shape natural behavior

Calhoun

Murthy

2019

Preprint

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Summary Internal states can shape stimulus responses and decision-making, but we lack methods to identify internal states and how they evolve over time. To address this gap, we have developed an unsupervised method to identify internal states from behavioral data, and have applied it to the study of a dynamic social interaction. During courtship, Drosophila melanogaster males pattern their songs using feedback cues from their partner. Our model uncovers three latent states underlying this behavior, and is able to predict the moment-to-moment variation in natural song patterning decisions. These distinct behavioral states correspond to different sensorimotor strategies, each of which is characterized by different mappings from feedback cues to song modes. Using the model, we show that a pair of neurons previously thought to be command neurons for song production are sufficient to drive switching between states. Our results reveal how animals compose behavior from previously unidentified internal states, a necessary step for quantitative descriptions of animal behavior that link environmental cues, internal needs, neuronal activity, and motor outputs.

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“…Wakefulness and arousal [9,10], locomotor activity states [11,12], satiety [13], attention [14], and emotions [5,6,15] represent a spectrum of physiological and neural states that can dramatically affect how animals respond to a given stimuli. Small animals like the nematode C. elegans are tractable model organisms for understanding how physiological and neural states combine with information from multiple sensory pathways and give rise to specific behavior [3,6,8,13,[16][17][18][19][20][21].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Satiety, Thermosensation and Mechanosensation Regulate a Spontaneous C. elegans Sleep State

Gonzales

Zhou

2019

Preprint

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One remarkable feature of behavior is an animal's ability to rapidly switch between activity states such as locomotion and quiescence; however, how the brain regulates these spontaneous transitions based on the animal's perceived environment is not well understood. Here we show a C. elegans sleep-like state on a scalable platform that enables simultaneous control of multiple environmental factors including temperature, mechanical stress, and food availability. This brief quiescent state, we refer to as "μSleep," occurs spontaneously in microfluidic chambers, which allows us to track animal movement and perform whole-brain imaging. With these capabilities, we establish that μSleep meets the behavioral requirements of C. elegans sleep and depends on multiple external factors. Specifically, we show that μSleep is regulated by satiety and temperature, which is consistent with prior reports of C. elegans sleep. Additionally, we show for the first time that C. elegans sleep can be induced through mechanosensory pathways. Together, these results establish a rich model system for studying how animals process multiple sensory pathways to regulate behavioral states.

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Quantifying behavior to solve sensorimotor transformations: advances from worms and flies

Cited by 49 publications

References 92 publications

Ethology as a physical science

Ethology as a physical science

Unsupervised identification of the internal states that shape natural behavior

Satiety, Thermosensation and Mechanosensation Regulate a Spontaneous C. elegans Sleep State

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