NEC Seminar, 5 September 2025
Speaker: Maia Jenckes
PI: Hillel J. Chiel
Title: Nervous system organization and neural control of adaptive behaviors in the sea slug Aplysia californica
Abstract:
One of the most unique and valuable functions of an animal’s nervous system is its ability to efficiently adapt to complex environments and circumstances. Adaptive behavior can be described in terms of flexibility, or the ability to switch between different behaviors to maintain task fitness (e.g. chewing to swallowing); and robustness, or the ability to modulate a behavior to maintain its effectiveness (e.g. walking on uneven terrain). Flexibility and robustness are key targets of research in both advanced robotic control and sensory-motor restoration. While significant progress has been made in both areas, vertebrate models of adaptive neurological function are often too complex to capture shifting interactions between individual neurons, limiting the precision with which researchers can characterize the relationships between nervous system organization and adaptive neural control. A large body of research has established the sea slug Aplysia californica as an effective neuroscience model for many aspects of learning and behavior. Their well-mapped nervous systems with approximately 20,000 neurons and their ability to exhibit multifaceted, adaptive behaviors make them ideal models for studying flexibility and robustness on the level of identified neural circuitry. This presentation will discuss ongoing efforts to understand how modular activation of neuronal groups may contribute to behavioral adaptation, as well as how this information relates to relevant questions of biomimetic control and sensory-motor restoration. Identifying individual neurons from multi-channel extracellular recordings, computationally modeling bilateral nervous system symmetry, and directly stimulating key neurons to drive adaptive behavior selection are all tools for developing more detailed models of the neurological mechanisms underlying flexible and robust behavior.
