Crowd Control

Spotting a face in a crowd is hard enough, so imagine tracking the movement of every person in one. That’s the challenge for researchers trying to analyse normal social behaviour in animals in order to better understand fundamental neurological processes underpinning healthy behaviour, and the changes that come with various physical and mental conditions. A new approach establishes virtual markers on each individual – a digital equivalent of a sensor on each limb and joint – then uses existing technology to analyse each individual at once. This approach, tested on a group of dancers (pictured, right) as well as schools of fish and groups of mice faithfully recorded movement even when one individual was obscured behind another with greater accuracy than existing techniques (left). The result could be used for injury investigations in team sports, or to establish baseline behaviour datasets in animals used to model neurological conditions.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Hirotsugu Azechi and Susumu Takahashi
• Laboratory of Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience, Graduate School of Brain Science, Doshisha University, Kyotanabe, Japan
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Biology, February 2025