Topic: Cruising

Survival requires the brain to generate flexible and adaptive behavioral mechanisms across multiple timescales. To understand how short timescale behaviors are chained to generate long sequences, we leverage high throughput behavioral recordings of the larval zebrafish subjected to diverse sensory stimuli. Fish swim in short and discrete burst-like motions bouts. We construct a maximally predictive state space by stacking consecutive bouts, and then investigate the time evolution of state-space densities through transfer operators. Their spectral decomposition reveals two stereotyped long time