The Neuroscience of Behavioral Flexibility and Social Communication

Our research addresses how the brain enables the extraordinary flexibility required for social communication. How do brains generate the right behavior at the right time, to facilitate effective interactions? This is a challenging problem, given that social cues, external contexts, and internal brain states are dynamic. Social communication is essential to life – it facilitates mating, the establishment of territory, finding food, avoiding harm, and caring for young – but we do not yet understand how neurons and neural circuits orchestrate the myriad processes that underlie communication. To solve these mysteries, we develop methods to measure and model the complexities of animal behavior and apply these, in combination with state-of-the-art techniques for neural recordings and the mapping of neural circuits, to a model system with abundant genetic tools. These tools make it possible to causally connect neural activity with changes in behavior.

Acoustic Communication

Key among the signals used for communication is sound – consider dogs barking, cats meowing, birds singing, or crickets chirping. Fruit flies (genus Drosophila) also produce and process patterned sounds during social interactions. Flies are a popular model system for neuroscience because their nervous system is simple, and the field has concertedly generated a wealth of genetic and neural circuit tools to interrogate it. Our work has demonstrated that flies are also an ideal model for studies of communication. By analyzing song and fly movements over large datasets, we found that rather than being a fixed action sequence, fly songs are highly variable. However, this variability can be explained by taking into account the dynamic sensory experience of the male in addition to his own fluctuating internal states. We also showed that these songs drive changes in female locomotion, and ultimately the feedback the male receives. Our work has revealed an unanticipated level of complexity and control in insect communication, and we are now extending this work to mice to compare circuit mechanisms underlying conserved computations. 

Neural Mechanisms

Our goal is to uncover the neuronal mechanisms within the brain that flexibly link sensory processing, internal state, and the patterning of behavior, to enable individuals to interact with each other in natural settings. To achieve our goal, we use a novel mix of highly quantitative assays of animal behavior, computational modeling, genetic and neural circuit manipulations, circuit tracing, and neural physiology in behaving animals. We study both how the nervous system generates and patterns acoustic signals, in addition to how acoustic signals are processed and interpreted to drive responsive behaviors. We are particularly interested in how the wiring diagram of the brain (its connectome) sets limits on internal brain states and sensorimotor dynamics, and how different context-dependent behaviors (like social communication) are coordinated at brain-scale.