The Neuroscience of Behavioral Flexibility and Social Communication

Our research addresses how the brain enables the extraordinary flexibility required for social communication. How do brains generate the right behavior at the right time, to facilitate effective interactions? This is a challenging problem, given that social cues, external contexts, and internal brain states are dynamic. Social communication is essential to life – it facilitates mating, the establishment of territory, finding food, avoiding harm, and caring for young – but we do not yet understand how neurons and neural circuits orchestrate the myriad processes that underlie communication. To solve these mysteries, we develop methods to measure and model the complexities of animal behavior and apply these, in combination with state-of-the-art techniques for neural recordings and the mapping of neural circuits, to a model system with abundant genetic tools. These tools make it possible to causally connect neural activity with changes in behavior.