Internal states

The meeting links amygdala-centered neural activity to emotional and internal states across molecules, cells, circuits, brain-wide networks and human neuroscience. Themes include motivation, reward, social behavior, threat, learning, memory, decision making, stress, addiction, pain and psychiatric disease. Basic, computational, translational and clinical researchers will discuss technologies for measuring, mapping, modelling and manipulating these mechanisms. Talks, poster sessions and discussion focus on emerging and unpublished research. Applicants need a science or engineering bachelor’s de

…but also by longer-term experiences, internal neuronal dynamics, and physiological states. As a result, the same experimental conditions can result in variable behaviors. We study the role of internal states in zebrafish larvae behavior, leveraging a rich dataset of three million movements recorded during spontaneous behavior, photomotor responses, optomotor responses, and visually driven escape in the zebraf

…multimodal sensory information and the internal states of each animal. Here, we investigate this interplay in female Drosophila (fruit fly) as she engages with the male during courtship, a highly dynamic social behavior. Previous work has shown that the male fly's courtship song is shaped by the subtle feedback cues from the female and is influenced by his internal states1,2. However, in the case of females, prior work has focused only on predicting her walking speed averaged over minutes3,4; her fast timescale res

…is influenced by sensory inputs, internal states, and memory, suggesting that neural mechanisms across the brain coordinate these decisions. While investigating the neural basis of behavioral switching requires whole-brain imaging, current methods face challenges in behaving animals. We employed functional ultrasound imaging (fUS) to record large-scale neural activity in head-fixed mice while simultaneously tracking their behavior. Our aim was to identify brain regions that predict trans

Understanding internal states is a prominent challenge in neuroscience, particularly when it comes to defining and expressing emotions across different species. The brain mechanisms responsible for driving evolutionarily conserved behaviors tied to internal states remain elusive. Ticklishness, a unique sensation observed in social species ranging from rodents to humans, is characterized by the emission of appetitive 50 kHz ultrasonic vocalizations in response to tickling. Previous research (Ishiyama & Brecht, 2016) identified the activation of the trunk somatosensory cortex (S1) during tic

Body movement conveys important information about agents’ internal states, such as their emotions or intentions. But how do humans use movement cues to understand others? A growing body of behavioural and neuroimaging work suggests that we map observed actions onto our own motor system to successfully interpret others’ movements, and that movement similarity between an agent and observer facilitates accurate inferences about the agent’s internal state. A network of frontal, parietal and occipitotemporal regions, termed the action-observation network (AON), is presumed to subserve this coupling

Animals must react to threatening stimuli in a way that increases their chance of survival. The visual loom is a known threatening stimulus that emulates an approaching predator and mainly elicits the C-startle escape response in larval zebrafish. However, the behavioral space of the response to the visual looms may also involve freezing and other types of swim bouts. In this work, we carried out free swimming behavioral experiments and immunofluorescence imaging protocols to explore the differences between types of visual looms and how they affect behavioral output through habituation and cha

Understanding how internally driven cognitive processes (COPs) give rise to behavior in different species is one of the key challenges in systems neuroscience. Traditionally, neuroscience has aimed to isolate individual COPs by simplifying sensory stimuli and behavioral readouts. Yet in natural behavior, several COPs can co-occur, often with overlapping neural representations. The dynamics of such superimposed COPs are yet to be understood, as well as the extent to which they generalize across species. To tackle this question, we developed a naturalistic Virtual Reality setup in which two spec

Animals modify their behavioral outputs in response to changes in external and internal environments. We use the nematode, C. elegans to probe the pathways linking changes in internal states like hunger with behavior. We find that acute food deprivation alters the localization of two transcription factors, likely releasing an insulin-like peptide from the intestine, which in turn modifies chemosensory neurons and alters behavior. These results present a model for how inter-tissue signals to generate flexible behaviors via gut-brain signaling.

…one of which is fluctuations in internal states (e.g., arousal, attention, and motivation). Neural variability may reflect changes in these internal cognitive factors and can influence our perceptual and decision-making abilities. For instance, when tasked with shooting consecutive free throws on a basketball court, we may experience changes in our arousal, and our minds might wander. Such trial-to-trial variability can

…the other’s behavior and one’s own internal state. How these two (social sensory cues and internal states) come together to drive behavior on a moment-to-moment basis is not yet clear. Here we fill this gap focusing on social interactions in Drosophila melanogaster. During courtship, males chase females and sing; female responses to male cues serve as critical feedback signals that shape the male’s ongoing behavior (Coen et al. 2014). In addition, we know that internal state

…arise both externally (sensory) and internally (neural dynamics and states). These cues are continuously produced and can be combined in different ways depending on the needs of the animal. However, the integration of these external and internal cues remains difficult to understand in natural behaviors. To address this gap, we have developed an unsupervised method to identify internal states from behavioral data, and have applied it to the study of a dynamic social interaction. During courtship, Drosophila melanogaster males patt

Social interactions such as mating and fighting are driven by internal emotional states. How can we study internal states of an animal when it cannot tell us its subjective feelings? Especially when the meaning of the animal’s behavior is not clear to us, can we understand the underlying internal states of the animal? In this talk, I will introduce our recent work in which we used male mounting behavior in mice as an example to understand the underlying internal state of the animals. In many animal species, males exhibit mounting behavior toward females as part of the mating behavior repertoi