Designing and Optimizing Visual Stimuli to drive behavior

I designed a range of naturalistic to synthetic animations to evoke predictable aggressive responses in Siamese fighting fish. These animations lead to the novel discovery that the elevation of a stimulus is one of the leading visual features that drive aggressive displays in these fish.

Publication: Everett, C.P., et al. In prep.

Deep characterizing of animal social behavior

Using machine-learning tracking software and custom python scripts, I helped build a pipeline for detailed behavior characterization of aggressive displays. Detailed behavior characterization is key for understanding the neural computations that underly complex social behaviors like intraspecific aggression.

Publication: Anqi, W., Buchanan, K.E., …. Everett, C.P., …. Paninski, L. Deep Graph Pose: a semi-supervised deep graphical model for improved animal pose tracking. NeurIPS, 2020.

Investigations into the neural systems underlying visually-evoked aggression

I developed a novel survival surgery set up in Siamese fighting fish and performed targeted ablation of the “fish amygdala”, Dm, to interrogate the role of the fish amygdala in the highly robust and synchronized aggression displays.

Publication: Everett, C.P. et al. In prep.