PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Gordon J. Berman
AU  - Daniel M. Choi
AU  - William Bialek
AU  - Joshua W. Shaevitz
TI  - Mapping the structure of drosophilid behavior
AID  - 10.1101/002873
DP  - 2014 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 002873
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/02/20/002873.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/02/20/002873.full
AB  - Most animals possess the ability to actuate a vast diversity of movements, ostensibly constrained only by morphology and physics. In practice, however, a frequent assumption in behavioral science is that most of an animal’s activities can be described in terms of a small set of stereotyped motifs. Here we introduce a method for mapping the behavioral space of organisms, relying only upon the underlying structure of postural movement data to organize and classify behaviors. We find that six different drosophilid species each perform a mix of non-stereotyped actions and over one hundred hierarchically-organized, stereotyped behaviors. Moreover, we use this approach to compare these species’ behavioral spaces, systematically identifying subtle behavioral differences between closely-related species.