Topic: female locomotion

The cost of experimental neural recordings strongly limits the stimuli or conditions one can present. Ideally, we would therefore like to know how neural responses observed in specific experiments generalize beyond them. E.g., how does the brain’s response to isolated sounds presented in the lab compare to its response to those sounds within natural language in complex social settings? We addressed this problem in fly courtship–a complex, acoustically mediated social behavior. Starting with recorded responses from diverse female neurons to isolated elements of male courtship song, we found the

Naturalistic animal behavior can now be efficiently collected and annotated, but understanding brain function in natural settings remains challenging. It is difficult to record neural activity in freely moving animals, and complex statistics and lack of stimulus repeats preclude traditional analyses. While a popular approach is to first identify reduced, data-driven behavioral variables prior to seeking neural correlates, we propose a complementary approach: comparing a suite of mechanistic models, directly fit to behavior, that embody competing hypotheses about single-cell or population neura

Communication is multi-modal - when we interact, we speak, gesticulate, and touch. However, the neural computations and circuits that choose these different communication signals are unclear. We address this issue in Drosophila which thanks to its complex social behavior and genetic toolbox is ideal for dissecting the neural basis of communication. During courtship, male flies produce two types of communication signals to woo the female: air-borne song is produced by wing movement, while substrate-borne vibrations are transmitted via the legs. Using statistical modelling of pose tracking data