Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The explosion of data on animal behavior in more natural contexts highlights the fact that these behaviors exhibit correlations across many timescales. However, there are major challenges in analyzing these data: records of behavior in single animals have fewer independent samples than one might expect. In pooling data from multiple animals, individual differences can mimic long-ranged temporal correlations; conversely, long-ranged correlations can lead to an overestimate of individual differences. We suggest an analysis scheme that addresses these problems directly, apply this approach to data on the spontaneous behavior of walking flies, and find evidence for scale-invariant correlations over nearly three decades in time, from seconds to one hour. Three different measures of correlation are consistent with a single underlying scaling field of dimension Δ=0.180±0.005.
Source: Physical Review Letters
Authors: William Bialek, Joshua W. Shaevitz
Institutions: Princeton University, Rockefeller University
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4367834334