Fluctuating landscapes and heavy tails in animal behavior.

ABSTRACT: Animal behavior is shaped by a myriad of mechanisms acting on a wide range of scales, which hampers quantitative reasoning and the identification of general principles. Here, we combine data analysis and theory to investigate the relationship between behavioral plasticity and heavy-tailed statistics often observed in animal behavior. Specifically, we first leverage high-resolution recordings of C. elegans locomotion to show that stochastic transitions among long-lived behaviors exhibit heavy-tailed first passage time distributions and correlation functions. Such heavy tails can be explained by slow adaptation of behavior over time. This particular result motivates our second step of introducing a general model where we separate fast dynamics on a quasi-stationary multi-well potentia

SUBMITTER: Costa AC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12393825 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Apr-Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature