From neural dynamics to individual and collective behaviour in zebrafish

There is a rich history of the study of collective animal behaviour in a wide range of species, including insects, fish, birds, and primates. A major bottleneck in many of these studies has been that the pathways of communication are not directly observable. Hence, how communication occurs must be inferred from dynamic relationships such as spatial associations among individuals. However, while spatial relations indeed inform interactions between individuals, they do so indirectly, through an individual’s detection of sensory cues or signals.

Recently, the focus is shifting from phenomenological descriptions of the interactions between individuals to explicitly considering how organisms acquire and integrate sensory information during behavioural decision-making. To deepen this new perspective, the project From neural dynamics to individual and collective behaviour in zebrafish develops new cutting-edge tools to study collective behaviour in immersive virtual reality and lay the groundwork to combine these methods with functional imaging of nervous system activity.