The Ecology of Interacting Brains

Department of Computational Biology

Featuring Dr. Andrew Hein , Assistant Professor, Department of Computational Biology, Cornell University
 

A dominant paradigm in the analysis of behavior is to separate “the brain” of an individual from “the environment” to which that individual is responding. Yet, in nature, the behaviors most vital to survival often involve ecological interactions with other organisms that are, themselves, generating dynamic, responsive behavior. The existence of such feedbacks between interacting brains significantly complicates analysis of natural behavior, and has historically limited our ability to predict how behaviors scale up to influence population processes. In this talk, I will discuss new data collection and fusion technologies, multi-scale mathematical theory, and interactive experiments we are developing in my lab to address these challenges. I will survey what we have learned from these methods, and the more general principles they are beginning to reveal about how behavior shapes ecological dynamics, and how ecology can shape behavior.