Computational Neuroscience InitiativeB404 Richards Labs, 3700 Hamilton Walk
Gordon Berman
Department of Biology
Emory University
Hierarchy and predictability in Drosophila behavior
Animals perform a complex array of behaviors, from changes in body posture to vocalizations to other dynamic outputs. Far from being a disordered collection of actions, however, there is thought to be an intrinsic structure to the set of behaviors and their temporal and functional organization. In this talk, I will introduce a novel method for mapping the behavioral space of organisms. This method relies only upon the underlying structure of postural movement data to organize and classify behavior, eschewing ad hoc behavioral definitions entirely and effectively compressing the vast amounts of data being collected. Applying this approach to videos of freely-behaving fruit flies, I will show that the organisms’ behavioral repertoire consists of a hierarchically-organized set of stereotyped behaviors. This hierarchical patterning results in the emergence of long time scales of memory in the system, providing insight into the mechanisms of behavioral control that occur over seconds, minutes, hours, days, and the entire lifetime of the fly and the underlying latent states modulating their activities.