Friday, May 16, 2025
5/16/2025
Multimodal behavioral analysis of oromanual food-handling in freely moving animals - PROJECT SUMMARY Oromanual food-handling – in which the hands and forelimbs work in a coordinated manner with the mouth and jaw to manipulate and consume a food item – is a fundamental behavior common to many rodent species as well as primates. Despite its ethological significance, oromanual food-handling has received remarkably little experimental attention, reflecting the technical challenges of recording at sufficient spatiotemporal resolution a behavior involving small, fast, and often visually occluded movements. We recently initiated efforts to overcome these challenges, developing paradigms for analyzing food-handling in mice using high-speed close-up video methods coupled with AI-based kinematic tracking. Here we propose to build on these advances through a set of planning activities leading to a powerful new approach for in-depth investigation of this behavior. The overall objective is to develop new experimental and analytical paradigms for recording food-handling behavior with high spatiotemporal resolution in freely moving animals, with a focus on understanding how elemental sub- movements are assembled into distinct goal-directed actions coordinated across multiple body parts. The technical approach includes design of a videographic recording arena incorporating a robotic camera positioning system. Electromyography from jaw-controller and forelimb muscles in freely moving mice will enable characterization of the elements of dexterous coordination involved in manipulating the food with both hands and jaw. Intranasal detection of breathing will enable characterization of sniff-related movements during food- handling, posited to represent an additional aspect of the behavior engaging the olfactory and respiratory systems. Exploratory studies will extend the approach in comparative, ecological, and developmental directions. The analytical approach will conceptualize the behavior in terms of the multiple components of the motor plant and behavioral modes and actions, including detailed ethogramming and incorporating machine learning-based tracking, modeling, and related computational methods. The anticipated results will constitute an innovative paradigm for quantitative analysis of food-handling, setting the stage for a future investigation of the neural mechanisms of this natural form of goal-directed dexterous behavior. Results from this research program furthermore have high potential to identify common principles of natural, complex, motor behavior in mammals in general.
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