Projects
Neural Dynamics in Social Behavior
PI: David J Anderson (Division of Biology and Biological Engineering)
SASE: Nestor Coria, Scholar
Our understanding of social behavior has been revolutionized by the ability to observe the rich dynamics of neural activity in the brains of freely interacting animals under naturalistic conditions. By studying these patterns of neural activity, the Anderson laboratory at Caltech has uncovered signals deep within the hypothalamus of the mouse brain that correlate with aggression, mating, and defensive behaviors.
To unlock the relationship between neural activity and behavior, the lab currently uses a suite of mathematical tools. They range from encoding models, used to predict patterns of activity in individual neurons from behavior, to decoding models that seek to find patterns of population neural activity that predict behavior. The lab uses Bayesian approaches, clustering methods, population geometrical tools and a myriad of other methods to tease apart different patterns of neural activity important for behavior. More recently, the lab has also pioneered the use of machine learning (ML)-enabled dynamical systems models that allow the dissection of neural activity during social behavior in an unbiased, unsupervised manner. Application of these ML models have allowed the identification of new computations performed by the brain during aggression and mating.
Earlier, the Schmidt Academy worked with the Anderson lab on enhancing the Mouse Action Recognition System (MARS) to obtain a detailed description of mouse pose during, and to perform unsupervised and supervised classification of, naturalistic social behaviors (https://sase.caltech.edu/projects/interface.html). Now, the Academy is collaborating on a complement to this toolbox, namely software for analyzing neural dynamics. The aim is to develop a user-friendly interface that integrates a suite of analysis methods and the mathematical tools described above so that it can be used for the robust analysis of neural data during social behavior.
