Predictability and hierarchy in Drosophila behavior

Even the simplest of animals exhibit behavioral sequences with complex temporal dynamics. Prominent amongst the proposed organizing principles for these dynamics has been the idea of a hierarchy, wherein the movements an animal makes can be understood as a set of nested sub-clusters. Although this type of organization holds potential advantages in terms of motion control and neural circuitry, measurements demonstrating this for an animal's entire behavioral repertoire have been limited in scope and temporal complexity. Here, we use a recently developed unsupervised technique to discover and track the occurrence of all stereotyped behaviors performed by fruit flies moving in a shallow arena. Calculating the optimally predictive representation of the fly's future behaviors, we show that fly behavior exhibits multiple time scales and is organized into a hierarchical structure that is indicative of its underlying behavioral programs and its changing internal states

Neural coding of naturalistic motion stimuli

We study a wide field motion sensitive neuron in the visual system of the blowfly {\em Calliphora vicina}. By rotating the fly on a stepper motor outside in a wooded area, and along an angular motion trajectory representative of natural flight, we stimulate the fly's visual system with input that approaches the natural situation. The neural response is analyzed in the framework of information theory, using methods that are free from assumptions. We demonstrate that information about the motion trajectory increases as the light level increases over a natural range. This indicates that the fly's brain utilizes the increase in photon flux to extract more information from the photoreceptor array, suggesting that imprecision in neural signals is dominated by photon shot noise in the physical input, rather than by noise generated within the nervous system itself.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figure

The thermodynamics of prediction

A system responding to a stochastic driving signal can be interpreted as computing, by means of its dynamics, an implicit model of the environmental variables. The system's state retains information about past environmental fluctuations, and a fraction of this information is predictive of future ones. The remaining nonpredictive information reflects model complexity that does not improve predictive power, and thus represents the ineffectiveness of the model. We expose the fundamental equivalence between this model inefficiency and thermodynamic inefficiency, measured by dissipation. Our results hold arbitrarily far from thermodynamic equilibrium and are applicable to a wide range of systems, including biomolecular machines. They highlight a profound connection between the effective use of information and efficient thermodynamic operation: any system constructed to keep memory about its environment and to operate with maximal energetic efficiency has to be predictive.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur

Long time scales, individual differences, and scale invariance in animal behavior

The explosion of data on animal behavior in more natural contexts highlights the fact that these behaviors exhibit correlations across many time scales. But there are major challenges in analyzing these data: records of behavior in single animals have fewer independent samples than one might expect; in pooling data from multiple animals, individual differences can mimic long-ranged temporal correlations; conversely long-ranged correlations can lead to an over-estimate of individual differences. We suggest an analysis scheme that addresses these problems directly, apply this approach to data on the spontaneous behavior of walking flies, and find evidence for scale invariant correlations over nearly three decades in time, from seconds to one hour. Three different measures of correlation are consistent with a single underlying scaling field of dimension $\Delta = 0.180\pm 0.005$

Coarse--graining, fixed points, and scaling in a large population of neurons

We develop a phenomenological coarse--graining procedure for activity in a large network of neurons, and apply this to recordings from a population of 1000+ cells in the hippocampus. Distributions of coarse--grained variables seem to approach a fixed non--Gaussian form, and we see evidence of scaling in both static and dynamic quantities. These results suggest that the collective behavior of the network is described by a non--trivial fixed point

Predicting rare events in chemical reactions: application to skin cell proliferation

In a well-stirred system undergoing chemical reactions, fluctuations in the reaction propensities are approximately captured by the corresponding chemical Langevin equation. Within this context, we discuss in this work how the Kramers escape theory can be used to predict rare events in chemical reactions. As an example, we apply our approach to a recently proposed model on cell proliferation with relevance to skin cancer [P.B. Warren, Phys. Rev. E {\bf 80}, 030903 (2009)]. In particular, we provide an analytical explanation for the form of the exponential exponent observed in the onset rate of uncontrolled cell proliferation.Comment: New materials and references added. To appear in Physical Review