Topic: multiplicative adaptation

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