Ilan Golani | Tel Aviv University (original) (raw)

Papers by Ilan Golani

Brain Research Bulletin, 1979

While enormous progress has been made in unraveling the proximate physiological mechanisms that a... more While enormous progress has been made in unraveling the proximate physiological mechanisms that account for anxiety, stress, and low mood, these states continue to give rise to considerable conceptual confusion. This is, in part, because proximate studies have neither been adequately distinguished from, nor integrated with, evolutionary explanations for the adaptive functions of anxiety, stress, and mood. A complete biological explanation that incorporates both proximate and evolutionary explanations will be of great value to better define the border between normal and pathological, to help to explain why pathological anxiety and depression are so common, and to provide a muchneeded basis for sensible decisions about when different pharmacological manipulations are likely to be helpful or harmful. Ideally, evolutionary considerations should provide a conceptual framework within which the biological significance of the proximate mechanisms can be better understood, and the proximate findings should provide tests of evolutionary hypotheses. Studies at the interface between evolutionary and proximate explanations will be difficult, but important to better understand individual differences in vulnerability and the etiology of diseases that result from dysregulation of anxiety and mood.

Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior, 2018

Figure S4. Capturing the dynamics of growth using a 90th percentile-LOESS function, illustrated b... more Figure S4. Capturing the dynamics of growth using a 90th percentile-LOESS function, illustrated by the maximal height per ascent in a selected mouse (first 64 ascents). Scaled raw data of maximal height per ascent are coloured in grey and the percentile-LOESS function is coloured in red. The dashed black horizontal line represents the 80% threshold, and the orange vertical line represents the time (in ascents) to reach the 80% threshold. The dynamics of growth in height consist roughly of two stages - a stage of rearing episodes (ascents 1 to 32), followed by rapid growth in height, until eventually the mouse reaches the top of the wall.

Figure S5. Illustration of the method for isolating 90-degrees and 180-degrees turns in a single ... more Figure S5. Illustration of the method for isolating 90-degrees and 180-degrees turns in a single selected ascent, in order to count direction changes. A) The original path traced on the wall during ascent 182 of mouse V07. The directionality of the movement within the ascent is marked by a transition from yellow (ascent starts) to red (ascent ends). B) The movement is constrained to either only vertical or only horizontal, by reducing the lower respective speed to zero and reconstructing the path. C) Noise reduction by repeated moving average (two repetitions with window width of 1.6 seconds). D) Repetition of the step presented in panel B using the smoothed coordinates. The estimate for the number of direction changes is the number of 90-degrees and 180-degrees turns in the path presented in panel D (in this example 34).

Figure S2. The first full blown ascent (in red) performed by mouse V05 is exceptionally long rela... more Figure S2. The first full blown ascent (in red) performed by mouse V05 is exceptionally long relative to subsequent ascents (in black), as though this mouse "gets trapped" on the wall. In mouse V05, the most extreme example of the phenomenon, the exceptional ascent lasted 3 minutes and 54 seconds, which is more than twice as long as the second longest ascent (1:46 minutes), and considerably longer than subsequent ascents reaching the top of the wire mesh (approx. 30 seconds each). This ascent is wide and involves a high number of pivots and direction changes, which usually characterize ascents performed in a late stage of the build-up in width and complexity.

Figure S3. High tangential speed (Vθ) is only observed in segments of movement on the ground. The... more Figure S3. High tangential speed (Vθ) is only observed in segments of movement on the ground. Therefore, capturing the boundary between the arena floor and the wall using the mouse's smoothed two-dimensional tracking coordinates is enabled by using only the set of points where Vθ was high. The left panel presents the smoothed 2D coordinates of a selected mouse (V02) during the entire session. In the middle panel, only points where Vθ≥8 cm/s (75th percentile) were plotted. In the left panel, only points where Vθ≥32 cm/s (92nd percentile) were plotted. Green marks the calculated boundary between the floor and the wall using the modified arena builder algorithm.

Figure S1. The mice exhibit growth in extent in borderline movement (top), incursions (middle) an... more Figure S1. The mice exhibit growth in extent in borderline movement (top), incursions (middle) and ascents (bottom) across the session. Left: an example of the type of movement corresponding to the plots on the right. Green marks a single borderline-exclusive excursion, red marks a single incursion and, blue marks a single ascent. Light grey represents the path history of the selected mouse (V01), light blue represents the lower circumference, and the dashed grey line marks the line between the doorway and the arena center (+). Right: the 90th percentile LOESS function demonstrate, for each mouse, the growth in extent in borderline movement across excursions (top), and in incursions (middle) and ascents (bottom). Each colour represents the same mouse in all three plots, as indicated in the legend at the top.

We discover and examine within a wide phylogenetic perspective spatial neophobia, avoid-ance of u... more We discover and examine within a wide phylogenetic perspective spatial neophobia, avoid-ance of untrodden terrain, in fruit flies, in an experimental setup that reduces the gap between the field and the laboratory. In our setup, fruit flies use a natal fruit as their origin, freely exploring for days their surroundings, which consists of a mixture of trodden and untrodden terrain. The interface between trodden and untrodden is, however, reduced in our setup to a wide doorway, opened within a surrounding wall. Crossing this doorway, characterized by a sharp contrast interface between trodden and untrodden, generates a behavior whose dynamics betrays the flies ' space neophobia. The moment-by-moment dynamics of crossing is remarkably similar to that reported in mouse models of anxiety. This means that neophobic behavior is either homologous across arthropods and vertebrates or, not less interesting, convergent, whereby the same behavior is mediated in the two phyla by two complet...

Exploration is a central component of animal behaviour studied extensively in rodents. Previous t... more Exploration is a central component of animal behaviour studied extensively in rodents. Previous tests of free exploration limited vertical movement to rearing and jumping. Here, we attach a wire mesh to the arena wall, allowing vertical exploration. This provides an opportunity to study the morphogenesis of behaviour along the vertical dimension, and examine the context in which it is performed. In the current set-up, the mice first use the doorway as a point reference for establishing a borderline linear path along the circumference of the arena floor, and then use this path as a linear reference for performing horizontal forays towards the centre (incursions) and vertical forays on the wire mesh (ascents). Vertical movement starts with rearing on the wall, and commences with straight vertical ascents that increase in extent and complexity. The mice first reach the top of the wall, then mill about within circumscribed horizontal sections, and then progress horizontally for increasingly longer distances on the upper edge of the wire mesh. Examination of the sequence of borderline segments, incursions and ascents reveals dimensional modularity: an initial series (bout) of borderline segments precedes alternating bouts of incursions and bouts of ascents, thus exhibiting sustained attention to each dimension separately. The exhibited separate growth in extent and in complexity of movement and the sustained attention to each of the three dimensions disclose the mice's modular perception of this environment and validate all three as natural kinds.

Department of Functional Genomics, Center for Neurogenomics and Cognitive Research (CNCR), VU Uni... more Department of Functional Genomics, Center for Neurogenomics and Cognitive Research (CNCR), VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands. oliver.stiedl@cncr.vu.nl Department of Molecular and Cellular Neurobiology, CNCR, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands Sylics B.V., Amsterdam, The Netherlands Biobserve GmbH, St. Augustin, Germany Department of Zoology, Faculty of Life Sciences and Sagol School for Neuroscience, Tel Aviv University, Israel

The Behavior of the Laboratory Rat, 2004

Rat exploratory behavior includes motor, locomotor, motivational, and cognitive aspects; it consi... more Rat exploratory behavior includes motor, locomotor, motivational, and cognitive aspects; it consists of a stimulating combination of stochastic and lawful elements. As technology improves, it becomes increasingly more accessible for data acquisition and analysis. This chapter reviews studies relating to the animal's trajectory in the environment and relating to interlimb coordination. Each section starts from the stage of automated data acquisition and then proceeds through the isolation of patterns of movement to global regularities.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2011

To obtain a perspective on an animal's own functional world, we study its behavior in situati... more To obtain a perspective on an animal's own functional world, we study its behavior in situations that allow the animal to regulate the growth rate of its behavior and provide us with the opportunity to quantify its moment-by-moment developmental dynamics. Thus, we are able to show that mouse exploratory behavior consists of sequences of repeated motion: iterative processes that increase in extent and complexity, whose presumed function is a systematic active management of input acquired during the exploration of a novel environment. We use this study to demonstrate our approach to quantifying behavior: targeting aspects of behavior that are shown to be actively managed by the animal, and using measures that are discriminative across strains and treatments and replicable across laboratories.

PloS one, 2015

We discover and examine within a wide phylogenetic perspective spatial neophobia, avoidance of un... more We discover and examine within a wide phylogenetic perspective spatial neophobia, avoidance of untrodden terrain, in fruit flies, in an experimental setup that reduces the gap between the field and the laboratory. In our setup, fruit flies use a natal fruit as their origin, freely exploring for days their surroundings, which consists of a mixture of trodden and untrodden terrain. The interface between trodden and untrodden is, however, reduced in our setup to a wide doorway, opened within a surrounding wall. Crossing this doorway, characterized by a sharp contrast interface between trodden and untrodden, generates a behavior whose dynamics betrays the flies' space neophobia. The moment-by-moment dynamics of crossing is remarkably similar to that reported in mouse models of anxiety. This means that neophobic behavior is either homologous across arthropods and vertebrates or, not less interesting, convergent, whereby the same behavior is mediated in the two phyla by two completely...

The discovery of shared behavioral processes across phyla is an essential step in the establishme... more The discovery of shared behavioral processes across phyla is an essential step in the establishment of a comparative study of behavior. We use immobility as an origin and reference for the measurement of locomotor behavior; speed, direction of walking and direction of facing as the three degrees of freedom shaping fly locomotor behavior; and cocaine as the parameter inducing a progressive transition in and out of immobility. In this way we expose and quantify the generative rules that shape part of fruit fly locomotor behavior, bringing about a gradual buildup of freedom during the transition from immobility to normal behavior and a precisely opposite narrowing down during the transition into immobility. During buildup the fly exhibits enhancement and then reduction to normal values of movement along each degree of freedom: first, body rotation in the horizontal plane, then path curvature and then speed of translation. Transition into immobility unfolds by narrowing down of the repe...

Journal of Applied …, 2004

Anxiety is a widely studied psychiatric disorder and is thought to be a complex and multidimensio... more Anxiety is a widely studied psychiatric disorder and is thought to be a complex and multidimensional phenomenon. Sensitive behavioral discrimination of animal models of anxiety is crucial for the elucidation of the behavioral components of anxiety and the physiological processes that mediate them. Commonly used behavior paradigms of anxiety usually include only a few automatically collected measures; these do not exhaust the behavioral richness exhibited by animals, thus perhaps missing important differences between preparations. The aim of the present study was to expand the repertoire of automatically collected measures in a classical test of anxiety: behavior in relation to the wall in the open field. We present an algorithm, based on the Software for the Exploration of Exploration strategy, which automatically partitions the mouse path into intrinsically defined patterns of movement near the wall and in the center. These patterns are used to design new end points, which provide an articulated description of various aspects of behavior near the wall and in the center. Sixteen new end points were designed with data from C57BL/6J and DBA/2J mice tested in three laboratories. The strain differences in all end points were evaluated on another data set to assess their validity and were found to remain stable. Ten of the sixteen end points were found to discriminate between the two strains in a replicable manner. The entire set of end points can be used on various genetic and pharmacological models of anxiety with good prospects of providing fine discrimination in a replicable manner.

Royal Society open science, 2018

Nature methods, Jan 27, 2017

The scientific community is increasingly concerned with cases of published "discoveries&quot... more The scientific community is increasingly concerned with cases of published "discoveries" that are not replicated in further studies. The field of mouse behavioral phenotyping was one of the first to raise this concern, and to relate it to other complicated methodological issues: the complex interaction between genotype and environment; the definitions of behavioral constructs; and the use of the mouse as a model animal for human health and disease mechanisms. In January 2015, researchers from various disciplines including genetics, behavior genetics, neuroscience, ethology, statistics and bioinformatics gathered in Tel Aviv University to discuss these issues. The general consent presented here was that the issue is prevalent and of concern, and should be addressed at the statistical, methodological and policy levels, but is not so severe as to call into question the validity and the usefulness of model organisms as a whole. Well-organized community efforts, coupled with im...