Related papers: Capturing the Continuous Complexity of Behavior in…
The 1mm roundworm C. elegans is a model organism used in many sub-areas of biology to investigate different types of biological processes. In order to complement the n-vivo analysis with computer-based investigations, several methods have…
Animal behaviors are sometimes decomposable into discrete, stereotyped elements. In one model, such behaviors are triggered by specific commands; in the extreme case, the discreteness of behavior is traced to the discreteness of action…
A major challenge in analyzing animal behavior is to discover some underlying simplicity in complex motor actions. Here we show that the space of shapes adopted by the nematode C. elegans is surprisingly low dimensional, with just four…
How do we capture the breadth of behavior in animal movement, from rapid body twitches to aging? Using high-resolution videos of the nematode worm $C. elegans$, we show that a single dynamics connects posture-scale fluctuations with…
Animal locomotion is often subject to constraints arising from anatomical/physiological asymmetries. We use the nematode C.~elegans as a minimal model system to ask whether such constraints might shape locomotion patterns optimized during…
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…
An organism's ability to move freely is a fundamental behaviour in the animal kingdom. To understand animal locomotion requires a characterisation of the material properties, as well as the biomechanics and physiology. We present a…
Neuromechanics aims to understand the link between an animal's neural activity and its physical behaviors. Recent advances in experimental and machine learning techniques enable simultaneous recordings of neural and locomotion dynamics over…
Understanding physical rules underlying collective motions requires perturbation of controllable parameters in self-propelled particles. However, controlling parameters in animals is generally not easy, which makes collective behaviours of…
Abrupt changes in behavior can often be associated with changes in underlying behavioral states. When placed off food, the foraging behavior of C. elegans can be described as a change between an initial local-search behavior characterized…
Animals employ different strategies for relating sensory input to behavioral output to navigate sensory environments, but what strategy to use, when to switch and why remain unclear. In C. elegans, navigation is composed of 'steering' and…
Organisms move through the world by changing their shape, and here we explore the mapping from shape space to movements in the nematode C. elegans as it crawls on a planar agar surface. We characterize the statistics of the trajectories…
The dynamics of complex systems generally include high-dimensional, non-stationary and non-linear behavior, all of which pose fundamental challenges to quantitative understanding. To address these difficulties we detail a new approach based…
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…
We exploit the reduced space of C. elegans postures to develop a novel tracking algorithm which captures both simple shapes and also self-occluding coils, an important, yet unexplored, component of worm behavior. We apply our algorithm to…
We investigate how locomotory behavior is generated in the brain focusing on the paradigmatic connectome of nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) and on neuronal activity patterns that control forward locomotion. We map the neuronal…
The neural dynamics of the nematode C. elegans are experimentally low-dimensional and correspond to discrete behavioral states, where previous modeling work has found neural proxies for some of these states. Experimental results further…
We apply topological data analysis to the behavior of C. elegans, a widely-studied model organism in biology. In particular, we use topology to produce a quantitative summary of complex behavior which may be applied to high-throughput data.…
Limbless locomotors, from microscopic worms to macroscopic snakes, traverse complex, heterogeneous natural environments typically using undulatory body wave propagation. Theoretical and robophysical models typically emphasize body…
Recent whole-brain calcium imaging recordings of the nematode C. elegans have demonstrated that neural activity is dominated by dynamics on a low-dimensional manifold that can be clustered according to behavioral states. Despite progress in…