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Probing the developing neural circuitry in Caenorhabditis elegans has enhanced our understanding of nervous systems. The C. elegans connectome, like those of other species, is characterized by a rich club of densely connected neurons…
Walking animals, like stick insects, cockroaches or ants, demonstrate a fascinating range of locomotive abilities and complex behaviors. The locomotive behaviors can consist of a variety of walking patterns along with adaptation that allow…
Spatially-embedded complex networks, such as nervous systems, the Internet and transportation networks, generally have non-trivial topological patterns of connections combined with nearly minimal wiring costs. However the growth rules…
The sensory-triggered activity of a neuron is typically characterized in terms of a tuning curve, which describes the neuron's average response as a function of a parameter that characterizes a physical stimulus. What determines the shapes…
To thrive in dynamic environments, animals must be capable of rapidly and flexibly adapting behavioral responses to a changing context and internal state. Examples of behavioral flexibility include faster stimulus responses when attentive…
Robots and self-driving vehicles face a number of challenges when navigating through real environments. Successful navigation in dynamic environments requires prioritizing subtasks and monitoring resources. Animals are under similar…
We introduce a generic, purely mechanical model for environment sensitive motion of mammalian cells that is applicable to chemotaxis, haptotaxis, and durotaxis as modes of motility. It is able to theoretically explain all relevant…
Neural Cellular Automata (NCAs) are a model of morphogenesis, capable of growing two-dimensional artificial organisms from a single seed cell. In this paper, we show that NCAs can be trained to respond to signals. Two types of signal are…
Emerging evidence shows that the modular organization of the human brain allows for better and efficient cognitive performance. Many of these cognitive functions are very fast and occur in subsecond time scale such as the visual object…
Caenorhabditis elegans, a free-living soil nematode, propels itself by producing undulatory body motion and displays a rich variety of body shapes and trajectories during its locomotion in complex environments. Here we show that the complex…
Understanding the dynamical behavior of complex systems from their underlying network architectures is a long-standing question in complexity theory. Therefore, many metrics have been devised to extract network features like motifs,…
For group-living animals, reaching consensus to stay cohesive is crucial for their fitness, particularly when collective motion starts and stops. Understanding the decision-making at individual and collective levels upon sudden disturbances…
Most models of neurons incorporate a capacitor to account for the marked capacitive behavior exhibited by the cell membrane. However, such capacitance is widely considered constant, thereby neglecting the possible effects of time-dependent…
We develop an artificial neural circuit for contour tracking and navigation inspired by the chemotaxis of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. In order to harness the computational advantages spiking neural networks promise over their…
The ability to acquire large-scale recordings of neuronal activity in awake and unrestrained animals poses a major challenge for studying neural coding of animal behavior. We present a new instrument capable of recording intracellular…
Although commonly associated with limbless animals like snakes and fish, multi-legged organisms like centipedes also utilize undulatory locomotion. Whether these undulations are actively reinforced or resisted by the axial musculature…
Animals (especially humans) have an amazing ability to learn new tasks quickly, and switch between them flexibly. How brains support this ability is largely unknown, both neuroscientifically and algorithmically. One reasonable supposition…
Understanding the activity of large populations of neurons is difficult due to the combinatorial complexity of possible cell-cell interactions. To reduce the complexity, coarse-graining had been previously applied to experimental neural…
A theoretical framework describing the set of interactions between neurons in the brain, or functional connectivity, should include dynamical functions representing the propagation of signal from one neuron to another. Green's functions and…
Undulatory locomotion is common to nematodes as well as to limbless vertebrates, but its control is not understood in spite of the identification of hundred of genes involved in Caenorhabditis elegans locomotion. To reveal the mechanisms of…