Gordon J Berman

Gordon J Berman
Emory University | EU · Department of Biology

Doctor of Philosophy

About

61
Publications
10,213
Reads
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2,469
Citations
Additional affiliations
September 2009 - August 2015
Princeton University
Position
  • Associate Research Scholar
August 2003 - July 2009
Cornell University
Position
  • Research Assistant

Publications

Publications (61)
Article
Full-text available
A frequent assumption in behavioural 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 an animal’s actions, relying only upon the underlying structure of postural movement data to organize and classify behaviours. Applying this method to the ground-...
Article
Full-text available
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 behavior...
Article
Just as manned flight was made possible by control mechanisms, the flapping-wing flight of animals also relies on strategies that ensure recovery from disturbances. Previous studies performed on tethered and dissected insects indicate that the sensory, neurological, and musculoskeletal systems play important roles in flight control. Such studies, h...
Article
Full-text available
We investigate aspects of hovering insect flight by finding the optimal wing kinematics which minimize power consumption while still providing enough lift to maintain a time-averaged constant altitude over one flapping period. In particular, we study the flight of three insects whose masses vary by approximately three orders of magnitude: fruitfly (Dros...
Article
Full-text available
Flying insects perform aerial maneuvers through slight manipulations of their wing motions. Because such manipulations in wing kinematics are subtle, a reliable method is needed to properly discern consistent kinematic strategies used by the insect from inconsistent variations and measurement error. Here, we introduce a novel automated method that...
Article
Full-text available
Understanding individuals’ distinct movement patterns is crucial for health, rehabilitation, and sports. Recently, we developed a machine learning-based framework to show that “gait signatures” describing the neuromechanical dynamics governing able-bodied and post-stroke gait kinematics remain individual-specific across speeds. However, we only eva...
Preprint
Full-text available
Understanding individuals' distinct movement patterns is crucial for health, rehabilitation, and sports. Recently, we developed a machine learning-based framework to show that "gait signatures" describing the neuromechanical dynamics governing able-bodied and post-stroke gait kinematics remain individual-specific across speeds. However, we only eva...
Article
Full-text available
Locomotion results from the interactions of highly nonlinear neural and biomechanical dynamics. Accordingly, understanding gait dynamics across behavioral conditions and individuals based on detailed modeling of the underlying neuromechanical system has proven difficult. Here, we develop a data-driven and generative modeling approach that recapitul...
Preprint
Full-text available
Locomotion results from the interactions of highly nonlinear neural and biomechanical dynamics. Accordingly, understanding gait dynamics across behavioral conditions and individuals based on detailed modeling of the underlying neuromechanical system has proven difficult. Here, we develop a data-driven and generative modeling approach that recapitul...
Article
Full-text available
Interactive biorobotics provides unique experimental potential to study the mechanisms underlying social communication but is limited by our ability to build expressive robots that exhibit the complex behaviours of birds and small mammals. An alternative to physical robots is to use virtual environments. Here, we designed and built a modular, audio...
Article
Two new toolkits that leverage deep-learning approaches can track the positions of multiple animals and estimate poses in different experimental paradigms.
Article
Full-text available
In almost all animals, the transfer of information from the brain to the motor circuitry is facilitated by a relatively small number of neurons, leading to a constraint on the amount of information that can be transmitted. Our knowledge of how animals encode information through this pathway, and the consequences of this encoding, however, is limite...
Article
Full-text available
Aging affects almost all aspects of an organism—its morphology, its physiology, its behavior. Isolating which biological mechanisms are regulating these changes, however, has proven difficult, potentially due to our inability to characterize the full repertoire of an animal’s behavior across the lifespan. Using data from fruit flies (D. melanogaste...
Article
Social relationships are dynamic and evolve with shared and personal experiences. Whether the functional role of social neuromodulators also evolves with experience to shape the trajectory of relationships is unknown. We utilized pair bonding in the socially monogamous prairie vole as an example of socio-sexual experience that dramatically alters b...
Preprint
Full-text available
Interactive biorobotics provides unique experimental potential to study the mechanisms underlying social communication but is limited by our ability to build expressive robots that exhibit the complex behaviours of birds and small mammals. An alternative to physical robots is to use virtual reality (VR). Here, we designed and built a modular, audio...
Article
Full-text available
Although different animal species often exhibit extensive variation in many behaviors, typically scientists examine one or a small number of behaviors in any single study. Here, we propose a new framework to simultaneously study the evolution of many behaviors. We measured the behavioral repertoire of individuals from six species of fruit flies usi...
Preprint
Full-text available
In almost all animals, the transfer of information from the brain to the motor circuitry is facilitated by a relatively small number of neurons, leading to a constraint on the amount of information that can be transmitted. Our knowledge of how animals encode information through this pathway, and the consequences of this encoding, however, is limite...
Preprint
Full-text available
Social relationships are dynamic and evolve with shared and personal experiences. Whether the functional role of social neuromodulators also evolves with experience to shape the trajectory of relationships is unknown. We utilized pair bonding in the socially monogamous prairie voles as an example of socio-sexual experience that dramatically alters...
Preprint
Full-text available
Aging affects almost all aspects of an organism -- its morphology, its physiology, its behavior. Isolating which biological mechanisms are regulating these changes, however, has proven difficult, potentially due to our inability to characterize the full repertoire of an animal's behavior across the lifespan. Using data from fruit flies (D. melanoga...
Preprint
Full-text available
A freely walking fly visits roughly 100 stereotyped states in a strongly non-Markovian sequence. To explore these dynamics, we develop a generalization of the information bottleneck method, compressing the large number of behavioral states into a more compact description that maximally preserves the correlations between successive states. Surprisin...
Article
In mammalian animal models, high-resolution kinematic tracking is restricted to brief sessions in constrained environments, limiting our ability to probe naturalistic behaviors and their neural underpinnings. To address this, we developed CAPTURE (Continuous Appendicular and Postural Tracking Using Retroreflector Embedding), a behavioral monitoring...
Preprint
Full-text available
Although extensive behavioral changes often exist between closely related animal species, our understanding of the genetic basis underlying the evolution of behavior has remained limited. Here, we propose a new framework to study behavioral evolution by computational estimation of ancestral behavioral repertoires. We measured the behaviors of indiv...
Article
A common feature in many neuroscience datasets is the presence of hierarchical data structures, most commonly recording the activity of multiple neurons in multiple animals across multiple trials. Accordingly, the measurements constituting the dataset are not independent, even though the traditional statistical analyses often applied in such cases...
Article
Behavior is more than the motor outputs that we can directly measure. Here Calhoun and colleagues devise a novel method for inferring the internal states that affect how fruit flies process sensory information during courtship, providing a new framework for understanding the neural encoding of behavior.
Preprint
Full-text available
A bstract A common feature in many neuroscience datasets is the presence of hierarchical data structures, most commonly recording the activity of multiple neurons in multiple animals across multiple trials. Accordingly, the measurements constituting the dataset are not independent, even though the traditional statistical analyses often applied in s...
Article
Full-text available
Dopamine is hypothesized to convey error information in reinforcement learning tasks with explicit appetitive or aversive cues. However, during motor skill learning feedback signals arise from an animal's evaluation of sensory feedback resulting from its own behavior, rather than any external reward or punishment. It has previously been shown that...
Preprint
Full-text available
Dopamine is hypothesized to convey important error information in reinforcement learning tasks with explicit appetitive or aversive cues. However, during motor skill learning the only available feedback signal is typically an animal’s evaluation of the sensory feedback arising from its own behavior, rather than any external reward or punishment. It...
Article
Full-text available
It is unclear where in the nervous system evolutionary changes tend to occur. To localize the source of neural evolution that has generated divergent behaviors, we developed a new approach to label and functionally manipulate homologous neurons across Drosophila species. We examined homologous descending neurons that drive courtship song in two spe...
Article
How are complicated behavioral sequences executed? In this issue of Neuron, Duistermars et al. (2018) deconstruct neural control schemes underlying threats in flies, finding a small collection of neurons in which varying levels of activation lead to the performance of different movements.
Article
Full-text available
In most animals, the brain makes behavioral decisions that are transmitted by descending neurons to the nerve cord circuitry that produces behaviors. In insects, only a few descending neurons have been associated with specific behaviors. To explore how descending neurons control an insect's movements, we developed a novel method to systematically a...
Article
Full-text available
The need for high-throughput, precise, and meaningful methods for measuring behavior has been amplified by our recent successes in measuring and manipulating neural circuitry. The largest challenges associated with moving in this direction, however, are not technical but are instead conceptual: what numbers should one put on the movements an animal...
Preprint
Full-text available
In most animals, the brain makes behavioral decisions that are transmitted by descending neurons to the nerve cord circuitry that produces behaviors. In insects, only a few descending neurons have been associated with specific behaviors. To explore how these neurons control an insect’s movements, we developed a novel method to systematically assay...
Preprint
The neural basis for behavioural evolution is poorly understood. Functional comparisons of homologous neurons may reveal how neural circuitry contributes to behavioural evolution, but homologous neurons cannot be identified and manipulated in most taxa. Here, we compare the function of homologous courtship song neurons by exporting neurogenetic rea...
Article
Measures of whole-brain activity, from techniques such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, provide a means to observe the brain's dynamical operations. However, interpretation of whole-brain dynamics has been stymied by the inherently high-dimensional structure of brain activity. The present research addresses this challenge through a series...
Article
Full-text available
Measures of whole-brain activity, from techniques such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, provide a means to observe the brain’s dynamical operations. However, interpretation of whole- brain dynamics has been stymied by the inherently high-dimensional structure of brain activity. The present research addresses this challenge through a series...
Data
Acoustic communication is fundamental to social interactions among animals, including humans. In fact, deficits in voice impair the quality of life for a large and diverse population of patients. Understanding the molecular genetic mechanisms of development and function in the vocal apparatus is thus an important challenge with relevance both to th...
Article
Full-text available
Comment in "Shaping the sound of voice. [Elife. 2017]"Jacqueline M Tabler and Maggie M Rigney contributed equally to this work.
Article
Full-text available
Behaviors involving the interaction of multiple individuals are complex and frequently crucial for an animal’s survival. These interactions, ranging across sensory modalities, length scales, and time scales, are often subtle and difficult to characterize. Contextual effects on the frequency of behaviors become even more difficult to quantify when p...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Functional connectivity (FC) in the brain reflects the time-varying cognitive demands imposed by our changing environment. Researchers have advanced methods towards evaluating such changes but no single dynamic FC method has emerged. This plurality of methodologies challenges the research community to implement efficient means for evaluating the re...
Article
Full-text available
Significance How an animal chooses to order its activities—moving, grooming, resting, and so on—is essential to its ability to survive, adapt, and reproduce. Here we investigate the temporal pattern of behaviors performed by fruit flies, finding that their movements are organized in a hierarchical manner that exhibits long time scales. This organiz...
Article
Full-text available
Social behaviors involving the interaction of multiple individuals are complex and frequently crucial for an animal's survival. These interactions, ranging across sensory modalities, length scales, and time scales, are often subtle and difficult to quantify. Contextual effects on the frequency of behaviors become even more difficult to quantify whe...
Preprint
Full-text available
Even the simplest of animals exhibit behavioral sequences with complex temporal dynamics. Prominent amongst the proposed organizing principles for these dynamics has been the idea of a hierarchy, wherein the movements an animal makes can be understood as a set of nested sub-clusters. Although this type of organization holds potential advantages in...
Preprint
Full-text available
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 behavior...
Article
Most experiments in the neurobiology of behavior rely upon the concept that animals frequently engage in stereotyped movements -- behaviors that an animal performs often and with great similarly. While these actions are often the basis for mapping neural circuits and understanding the effects of genetic manipulations, stereotypy is usually defined...
Chapter
Full-text available
Complex behaviors of flying insects require interactions among sensory-neural systems, wing actuation biomechanics, and flapping-wing aerodynamics. Here, we review our recent progress in understanding these layers for maneuvering and stabilization flight of fruit flies. Our approach combines kinematic data from flying insects and aerodynamic simula...
Article
The last decades have seen an explosion in our ability to characterize the molecular, cellular and genetic building blocks of life; the ingredients out of which we try to explain the rich and compelling behavior of living organisms. Our characterization of behavior itself, however, has advanced more slowly. Since modern ethology was founded over a...
Article
Over the past century, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has arisen as almost a lingua franca in the study of animal behavior, having been utilized to study questions in fields as diverse as sleep deprivation, aging, and drug abuse, amongst many others. Accordingly, much is known about what can be done to manipulate these organisms genetically,...
Article
Full-text available
Just as the Wright brothers implemented controls to achieve stable airplane flight, flying insects have evolved behavioral strategies that ensure recovery from flight disturbances. Pioneering studies performed on tethered and dissected insects demonstrate that the sensory, neurological, and musculoskeletal systems play important roles in flight con...
Article
Insects are enviable flyers and are capable of unusual maneuvers, such as sideways flight. We show that fruit flies generate sideways forces in flight, and we propose an aerodynamic mechanism that takes advantage of the unique features of flapping flight. Specifically, flies induce asymmetries between the right and left wing angles of attack just a...
Article
Insects in flight often accomplish startling maneuvers via remarkably small adjustments in wing kinematics. For example, angle of attack modulations and asymmetries of less than 10 degrees can be the difference between an individual continuing forward, or entering a sharp turn. Hence, in order to study maneuvering flight in insects, a reliable, low...
Article
By computing the aerodynamic forces on the wings of flying insects, we have previously shown evidence that the wing pitching associated with flapping flight can be passive. Presently, we extend this work to show that it is possible to extract information about muscle control directly from experimental observations. Using a combination of numerical...
Article
Observing different species of fruit flies offers an opportunity to compare flight strategies for insects of varying size but of nearly identical body and wing architecture. Using automated three-dimensional high-speed videography, we have captured many free-flight sequences of flies. We extract complete body and wing kinematics and determine the f...
Article
There has been much interest in studying how aspects of animal locomotion are affected by variation in organism size and morphology. In the case of insect flight, we are particularly interested in how the mechanisms of lift production and the energy efficiency of flight are affected by size and wing-structure. Here, we analyze 3D free-flight data o...
Article
Insects are graceful and varied locomotors -- flying, darting, and hovering with remarkable ease. But are they efficient? By determining the forces acting on a wing for a prescribed motion via a quasi-steady model of fluid forces on a thin plate, we run optimization algorithms to find the optimal wing motion that an insect can make. A common belief...

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