Development of social behavior in young zebrafish

All animals evaluate the salience of external stimuli and integrate them with internal physiological information into adaptive behavior. Natural and sexual selection impinge on these processes, yet our understanding of behavioral decision-making mechanisms and their evolution is still very limited. Insights from mammals indicate that two neural circuits are of crucial importance in this context: the social behavior network and the mesolimbic reward system. Here we review evidence from neurochemical, tract-tracing, developmental, and functional lesion/stimulation studies that delineates homology relationships for most of the nodes of these two circuits across the five major vertebrate lineages: mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and teleost fish. We provide for the first time a comprehensive comparative analysis of the two neural circuits and conclude that they were already present in early vertebrates. We also propose that these circuits form a larger social decision-making (SDM) network that regulates adaptive behavior. Our synthesis thus provides an important foundation for understanding the evolution of the neural mechanisms underlying reward processing and behavioral regulation. Copyright © 2011 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

The current study investigated the interpersonal coordination that occurred between two people when sitting side-by-side in rocking chairs. In two experiments participant pairs rocked in chairs that had the same or different natural periods. By instructing pairs to coordinate their movements inphase or antiphase, Experiment 1 investigated whether the stable patterns of intentional interpersonal coordination were consistent with the dynamics of within person interlimb coordination. By instructing the participants to rock at their own preferred tempo, Experiment 2 investigated whether the rocking chair movements of visually coupled individuals would become unintentionally coordinated. The degree to which the participants fixated on the movements of their co-actor was also manipulated to examine whether visual focus modulates the strength of interpersonal coordination. As expected, the patterns of coordination observed in both experiments demonstrated that the intentional and unintentional interpersonal coordination of rocking chair movements is constrained by the self-organizing dynamics of a coupled oscillator system. The results of the visual focus manipulations indicate that the stability of a visual interpersonal coupling is mediated by attention and the degree to which an individual is able to detect information about a co-actor's movements.

The design of modern scientific experiments requires the control and monitoring of many different data streams. However, the serial execution of programming instructions in a computer makes it a challenge to develop software that can deal with the asynchronous, parallel nature of scientific data. Here we present Bonsai, a modular, high-performance, open-source visual programming framework for the acquisition and online processing of data streams. We describe Bonsai's core principles and architecture and demonstrate how it allows for the rapid and flexible prototyping of integrated experimental designs in neuroscience. We specifically highlight some applications that require the combination of many different hardware and software components, including video tracking of behavior, electrophysiology and closed-loop control of stimulation.