Matthew Lovett-Barron

Matthew Lovett-Barron

UC San Diego

Neurobiology of movement decisions in animal collectives

NYU Meyer Hall, 4 Washington Pl, room 636

Abstract

Many animals move in groups, where interactions among individuals produce emergent collective behavior. My lab is interested in the perceptual and neural mechanisms of visually-based collective movement in the schooling micro glassfish (Danionella cerebrum). Here I will discuss how the visual systems of Danionella respond to patterns of conspecific movement and postures, and how these sensory inputs lead to the individual movement decisions that enable group-level behavior.

Speaker Bio 

Matt received his BSc from Queen’s University in Canada (2009), his PhD in Neurobiology from Columbia University (2014), and was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. Matt started his lab at UC San Diego in 2020, where his group studies the neurobiology of collective behavior, internal states, and behavioral adaptation in fish.