From motion to interaction: integration of elementary visual cues in zebrafish social behavior

Many species live in groups and coordinate behavior with conspecifics, but the sensory computations that allow individuals to detect, evaluate, and respond to others remain difficult to study. A major challenge is that social interactions are reciprocal: animals continuously change each other’s sensory experience, making it hard to separate stimulus, perception, internal state, and behavioral response.

In my lab, we use juvenile zebrafish shoaling as an experimentally accessible model for vertebrate social behavior. Using virtual reality, we previously identified self-like biological motion as a visual trigger of shoaling and traced this signal into a tecto-thalamic pathway that contributes to social attraction. We now build on this framework to ask how elementary visual cues are combined into richer social representations.

I will discuss two examples. In one project, behavioral experiments and neural recordings suggest that zebrafish evaluate group size through an integrated visual variable that combines object number and motion, so that faster small groups can become behaviorally equivalent to slower larger groups. In another, we study social buffering: the reduction of fear-related behavior by conspecific cues. Here, social information can either transmit immediate alarm or provide persistent safety, depending on context. Whole-brain activity mapping reveals neural correlates of fear state and its suppression by social cues.

Together, these projects show how controlled visual stimuli, quantitative behavior, whole-brain activity mapping, and cellular-resolution imaging can reveal how animals transform simple sensory features into social decisions. More broadly, this work aims to understand how nervous systems extract meaning from the motion and presence of others — from detecting social cues to finding safety in numbers.