Topic: animal behaviour

Under the theme Aspiration, Action, Anticipation: AI for Science Looking to 2030, this summit asks how AI is already changing scientific practice and how research may develop over the next few years. Researchers will examine scientific reasoning and discovery alongside applications in cancer biology, climate and weather prediction, animal behaviour and cosmology. Talks, discussion and a poster session connect methodological advances with practical scientific problems. Confirmed contributors include Max Welling, Hana Aliee, Boris Bolliet, Cait Newport, Richard Turner, Neil Lawrence, Stephen Rob

Tinbergen encouraged ethologists to address animal behaviour by answering four questions, covering physiology, adaptation, phylogeny, and development. This broad approach has implications for neuroscience and psychology, yet, questions about phylogeny are rarely considered in these fields. Here I describe how phylogeny can shed light on our understanding of brain structure and function. Further, I show that we now have or are developing the data and analytical methods necessary to study the natural history of the human mind.

Colour vision plays important roles in regulating animal behaviour, yet understanding of how such information is processed in the brain is still incomplete. Here I discuss our work addressing this issue in mice where, despite aspects of retinal organisation that might suggest limited capacity for colour vision, we find evidence of extensive cone-dependent spectral opponency across subcortical visual centres. In particular, our data both reveals important contributions of such colour signals to non-image-forming functions (regulation of the circadian system) but also indicate surprisingly sophi