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Rapid advances in genetics, genomics, and imaging have given insight into the molecular and cellular basis of behaviour in a variety of model organisms with unprecedented detail and scope. It is increasingly routine to isolate behavioural…
A fundamental goal of systems neuroscience is to probe the dynamics of neural activity that drive behavior. Here we present an instrument to simultaneously manipulate neural activity via Channelrhodopsin, monitor neural response via GCaMP3,…
The roundworm C. elegans exhibits robust escape behavior in response to rapidly rising temperature. The behavior lasts for a few seconds, shows history dependence, involves both sensory and motor systems, and is too complicated to model…
Synchronization plays a key role in information processing in neuronal networks. Response of specific groups of neurons are triggered by external stimuli, such as visual, tactile or olfactory inputs. Neurons, however, can be divided into…
Naturalistic animal behavior exhibits a strikingly complex organization in the temporal domain, whose variability stems from at least three sources: hierarchical, contextual, and stochastic. What are the neural mechanisms and computational…
A quantitative understanding of organism-level behavior requires predictive models that can capture the richness of behavioral phenotypes, yet are simple enough to connect with underlying mechanistic processes. Here we investigate the…
One of the biggest challenges in biology is to understand how activity at the cellular level of neurons, as a result of their mutual interactions, leads to the observed behavior of an organism responding to a variety of environmental…
We experimentally studied the locomotion of the nematode C. elegans in both fluidic and granular media. In this fluid dynamics video, we show the motility gaits of the nematode in these two environments. The motility of the nematode C.…
The neural activity in the visual processing is influenced by both external stimuli and internal brain states. Ideally, a neural predictive model should account for both of them. Currently, there are no dynamic encoding models that…
Stylized models of the neurodynamics that underpin sensory motor control in animals are proposed and studied. The voluntary motions of animals are typically initiated by high level intentions created in the primary cortex through a…
Recent whole brain imaging experiments on $\textit{C. elegans}$ has revealed that the neural population dynamics encode motor commands and stereotyped transitions between behaviors on low dimensional manifolds. Efforts to characterize the…
A fundamental problem in neuroscience is understanding how a network's properties dictate its function. Connectomics provides one avenue to predict nervous system function. To test this explicitly, we systematically measure signal…
There is renewed interest in modeling and understanding the nervous system of the nematode $\textit{Caenorhabditis elegans}$ ($\textit{C. elegans}$), as this small model system provides a path to bridge the gap between nervous system…
Biological systems display impressive capabilities in effectively responding to environmental signals in real time. There is increasing evidence that organisms may indeed be employing near optimal Bayesian calculations in their…
We propose a data-driven approach to represent neuronal network dynamics as a Probabilistic Graphical Model (PGM). Our approach learns the PGM structure by employing dimension reduction to network response dynamics evoked by stimuli applied…
Computational approaches which emulate in-vivo nervous system are needed to investigate mechanisms of the brain to orchestrate behavior. Such approaches must integrate a series of biophysical models encompassing the nervous system, muscles,…
Free-living nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is a powerful genetic model, essential for investigations ranging from behavior to neuroscience to aging, and locomotion is a key observable used in these studies. However, despite the fact that…
We propose an effective way to create interpretable control agents, by re-purposing the function of a biological neural circuit model, to govern simulated and real world reinforcement learning (RL) test-beds. We model the tap-withdrawal…
Rapid anthropogenic environmental changes, including those due to habitat contamination, degradation, and climate change, have far-reaching effects on biological systems that may outpace animals' adaptive responses (Radchuk et al., 2019).…
To make informed decisions in natural environments that change over time, humans must update their beliefs as new observations are gathered. Studies exploring human inference as a dynamical process that unfolds in time have focused on…