Themes and Variations in Animal Behavior

Institute Seminar by Gordon Berman

  • Datum: 25.07.2023
  • Uhrzeit: 10:30 - 11:30
  • Vortragende(r): Gordon Berman
  • Dr. Gordon Berman is an Associate Professor of Biology at the Emory College of Arts and Sciences. His research focuses on the intricate interactions that underlie the temporal ordering, control, and evolution of an organism’s movements, attempting to unearth general organizing principles that apply across species.
  • Ort: University of Konstanz
  • Raum: ZT1202 + online
  • Gastgeber: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
  • Kontakt: jgraving@ab.mpg.de
Themes and Variations in Animal Behavior
Animal behavior consists of an intricate hierarchy of dynamics, from brief muscle twitches to stereotyped behaviors to longer-lived states like hunger, aggression, and parenting. How does an animal bridge these timescales to create complex sequences of actions? The approach that most researchers take when studying sequences of behaviors tends to be strictly probabilistic, observing how discrete states transition in a largely memoryless fashion. In this talk, I will describe a different approach: fitting dynamical models to long behavioral sequences from fruit flies and rodents. We show that these models replicate many summary statistics of the underlying behavioral sequence data and that their fixed points have a geometry that mirrors the geometry of the animals' behavioral repertoires. In addition, we show that the long timescales generated by this model are best explained by a hierarchy of interacting dynamical subsystems. These results can be used to make predictions about the underlying “hidden” physiological states governing behavior and how behaviors may evolve.

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