Publications by Mackenzie Mathis

Neuropeptides specify and reprogram division of labor in the leafcutter ant Atta cephalotes

Social insects offer powerful models to investigate mechanisms of elaborate individual behaviors comprising a cooperative community. Workers of the leafcutter ant genus Atta are extreme examples of behavioral segregation among phenotypically distinct worke ...

Elsevier BV2025

Ethological computational psychiatry: Challenges and opportunities

Mackenzie Mathis

Studying the intricacies of individual subjects' moods and cognitive processing over extended periods of time presents a formidable challenge in medicine. While much of systems neuroscience appropriately focuses on the link between neural circuit functions ...

Current Biology Ltd2024

Keypoint-MoSeq: parsing behavior by linking point tracking to pose dynamics

Alexander Mathis, Mackenzie Mathis, Shaokai Ye

Keypoint tracking algorithms can flexibly quantify animal movement from videos obtained in a wide variety of settings. However, it remains unclear how to parse continuous keypoint data into discrete actions. This challenge is particularly acute because key ...

2024

Decoding the brain: From neural representations to mechanistic models

Alexander Mathis, Mackenzie Mathis

A central principle in neuroscience is that neurons within the brain act in concert to produce perception, cognition, and adaptive behavior. Neurons are organized into specialized brain areas, dedicated to different functions to varying extents, and their ...

CELL PRESS2024

SuperAnimal pretrained pose estimation models for behavioral analysis

Alexander Mathis, Mackenzie Mathis, Steffen Schneider, Shaokai Ye, Maxime Michel André Vidal, Jessy Lauer, Tian Qiu

Quantification of behavior is critical in diverse applications from neuroscience, veterinary medicine to animal conservation. A common key step for behavioral analysis is first extracting relevant keypoints on animals, known as pose estimation. However, re ...

Nature Research2024

Data for Contrasting action and posture coding with hierarchical deep neural network models of proprioception

Alexander Mathis, Mackenzie Mathis, Matthias Bethge

############# Contrasting action and posture coding with hierarchical deep neural network models of proprioception, eLife 2023 ############# Authors: Kai J Sandbrink, Pranav Mamidanna, Claudio Michaelis, Matthias Bethge, Mackenzie W Mathis and Alexander ...

Zenodo2024

Dimensionality reduction of time-series data, and systems and devices that use the resultant embeddings

Mackenzie Mathis, Steffen Schneider

Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on a computer storage medium, for dimensionality reduction of time-series using contrastive learning. A method can include receiving multidimensional input time series data that includes ...

2023

Brain dynamics uncovered using a machine-learning algorithm

Mackenzie Mathis

CEBRA is a machine-learning method that can be used to compress time series in a way that reveals otherwise hidden structures in the variability of the data. It excels at processing behavioural and neural data recorded simultaneously, and it can decode act ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2023

Reaching an understanding of cortico-medullary control of forelimb behaviors

Mackenzie Mathis, Thomas Trevelyan James Sainsbury

How the neocortex modulates hindbrain and spinal circuits is of fundamental interest for understanding mo-tor control and adaptive behaviors. New work from Yang, Kanodia, and Arber demonstrates that there is an exquisite anatomical organization and functio ...

CELL PRESS2023

NeuroAI: If grid cells are the answer, is path integration the question?

Alexander Mathis, Mackenzie Mathis, Markus Frey

Spatially modulated neurons known as grid cells are thought to play an important role in spatial cognition. A new study has found that units with grid-cell-like properties can emerge within artificial neural networks trained to path integrate, and develope ...

CELL PRESS2023