Topic: animal behavior

Foundational biology from molecules and cells to organisms, populations, ecosystems and biomes. Named areas include biochemistry, genomics, synthetic biology, animal behavior, physiology and neural systems. Neural-systems research includes developmental, genetic, molecular and cellular organization, sensorimotor activation, synaptic and circuit plasticity, and computational approaches. The call also supports biological datasets and methods for observing, measuring, modeling and manipulating living systems. Single investigators, teams and consortia may propose; routine applications, product or

The abstract representation of space has been extensively studied in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex. Yet while a growing variety of theoretical models have been proposed to capture the rich neural and behavioral phenomenology associated with these regions, it remains difficult to compare these theories systematically against each other using the full range of empirical data. To address this gap, we built an open-source standardised software framework, named NeuralPlayground, to facilitate comparisons of hippocampus and entorhinal cortex models. This Python software package offers a repr

Quantification of animal behavior is critical to neuroscience, genetics, and ethology research. Despite the recent development of a deep-learning-based pose estimation model, the usage of those systems has been limited due to the various video recording environment and hardware systems. Here we introduce a novel open-field experimental hardware with multi-vision and a 3D real-time behavior analysis system, based on the efficient and rapid object-detection deep learning algorithm, named AVATAR (AI Vision Analysis for Three-dimensional Action in Real-time). Combining this system with an automate

Understanding the neural basis of animal behavior is a central challenge in biology. In this work, we establish a connection between the spatio-temporal decision-making processes of animals and the ring attractor dynamics of neurons, which determine the organism's heading direction. We formulate a neural field model within the mean field approximation to provide a microscopic description of the spontaneous formation of bifurcations along their movement trajectories towards multiple targets, as observed in recent animal experiments. The direction of movement corresponds to the position of the a