Tosif Ahamed

Abstract 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 trajectory diffusion, and longer-lived behavioral states. We take short posture sequences as an instantaneous behavioral measure, fixing the sequence length for maximal prediction.

In many animals, there is a direct correspondence between the motor patterns that drive locomotion and the motor neuron innervation. For example, the adult C. elegans moves with symmetric and alternating dorsal-ventral bending waves arising from symmetric motor neuron input onto the dorsal and ventral muscles. In contrast to the adult, the C.

Abstract Animal behaviour is often quantified through subjective, incomplete variables that mask essential dynamics. Here, we develop a maximally predictive behavioural-state space from multivariate measurements, in which the full instantaneous state is smoothly unfolded as a combination of short-time posture sequences.