Quantification of Behavioral Stereotypy in Flies

A commonly accepted assumption in the study of behavior is that an organism’s behavioral repertoire can be represented by a relatively small set of stereotyped actions. Here, ``stereotypy" is defined as a measure of the similarity of repetitions of a behavior. Our group utilizes data-driven analyses on videos of ground-based \textit{Drosophila} to organize the set of spontaneous behaviors into a two-dimensional map, or behavioral space. We utilize this framework to define a metric for behavioral stereotypy. This measure quantifies the variance in a given behavior’s periodic trajectory through a space representing its postural degrees of freedom. This newly developed behavioral metric has confirmed a high degree of stereotypy among most behaviors and we correlate stereotypy with various physiological effects.