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Abstract Significant advances in computational ethology have allowed the quantification of behaviour in unprecedented detail. Tracking animals in social groups, however, remains challenging as most existing methods can either capture pose or robustly retain individual identity over time but not both.To capture finely resolved behaviours while maintaining individual identity, we built NAPS (NAPS is ArUco Plus SLEAP), a hybrid tracking framework that combines state‐of‐the‐art, deep learning‐based methods for pose estimation (SLEAP) with unique markers for identity persistence (ArUco). We show that this framework allows the exploration of the social dynamics of the common eastern bumblebee (Bombus impatiens).We provide a stand‐alone Python package for implementing this framework along with detailed documentation to allow for easy utilization and expansion. We show that NAPS can scale to long timescale experiments at a high frame rate and that it enables the investigation of detailed behavioural variation within individuals in a group.Expanding the toolkit for capturing the constituent behaviours of social groups is essential for understanding the structure and dynamics of social networks. NAPS provides a key tool for capturing these behaviours and can provide critical data for understanding how individual variation influences collective dynamics.
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Tracking changes in behavioural dynamics using prediction error
Automated analysis of video can now generate extensive time series of pose and motion in freely-moving organisms. This requires new quantitative tools to characterise behavioural dynamics. For the model roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans , body pose can be accurately quantified from video as coordinates in a single low-dimensional space. We focus on this well-established case as an illustrative example and propose a method to reveal subtle variations in behaviour at high time resolution. Our data-driven method, based on empirical dynamic modeling, quantifies behavioural change as prediction error with respect to a time-delay-embedded ‘attractor’ of behavioural dynamics. Because this attractor is constructed from a user-specified reference data set, the approach can be tailored to specific behaviours of interest at the individual or group level. We validate the approach by detecting small changes in the movement dynamics of C. elegans at the initiation and completion of delta turns. We then examine an escape response initiated by an aversive stimulus and find that the method can track return to baseline behaviour in individual worms and reveal variations in the escape response between worms. We suggest that this general approach—defining dynamic behaviours using reference attractors and quantifying dynamic changes using prediction error—may be of broad interest and relevance to behavioural researchers working with video-derived time series.
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- PAR ID:
- 10298679
- Editor(s):
- Gilestro, Giorgio F
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- PLOS ONE
- Volume:
- 16
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 1932-6203
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- e0251053
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0251053
