Dresden 2026 – scientific programme

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TUT: Tutorien

TUT 4: Tutorium: Physics of Behavior (joint session SOE/TUT/DY)

TUT 4.2: Tutorial

Sunday, March 8, 2026, 17:15–18:15, HSZ/0004

Physics of Behavior — •Antonio Carlos Costa — Paris Brain Institute, Paris, France

Animal behavior is inherently nonlinear and multiscale, spanning millisecond movements to hour-long strategies. In the second half of our session, we will complement first-principles approaches with data-driven methods to identify multiscale dynamics in behavioral data.

We will present three key techniques: (1) state space reconstruction combined with transfer operators to extract long-timescale modes from partial observations, (2) coarse-grained modeling to infer slowly-varying behavioral dynamics and explain heavy-tailed statistics, and (3) a multiscale distance metric for reconstructing behavioral phenotypes from dynamic observations.

We will review the theoretical foundations of slow mode identification using transfer operators (illustrated with stochastic and chaotic toy models), and then demonstrate their applicability to real-world data, including posture dynamics in C. elegans and zebrafish.

Keywords: Transfer Operators; Dynamical Systems; Chaos; Stochastic processes; Out-of-equilibrium