# Functional maturation of neural circuits for biological motion perception and social engagement

> **NIH NIH DP2** · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO · 2023 · $1,378,728

## Abstract

Project Summary/Abstract
Social animals can obtain information by looking at one another – paying attention to the “body language” of
group members and adjusting their actions accordingly. This is evident in the behavior of vertebrates such as
primates and some species of schooling fish, which orient their position, posture, and heading direction
according to the position, posture, and gaze of their social partners. The ability to attend to the biological
motion cues of others is also a hallmark of human social development, and emerges early in infancy for
typically developing children. In contrast, children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) display pronounced
deficits in their ability to attend to biological motion cues – including body posture and gaze direction – a
critical social impairment that can be an early sign of ASD in young children. Despite its importance, the
neural circuits mediating the functional and dysfunctional processing of biological motion information are
poorly understood, in part due to the challenges of studying distributed subcortical circuits across
development in mammals. Here I propose a research strategy to study the development of social brain
circuits for biological motion perception in schooling fish, taking advantage of highly- conserved subcortical
networks that support innate visual processing, orienting behavior, and social engagement in vertebrates. My
lab will study the development of the social brain in the micro glassfish (Danionella cerebrum), a vertebrate
model system with the unique features of genetic amenability, small size, and life-long optical transparency,
enabling brain-wide in vivo cellular-resolution calcium imaging in adulthood. Our preliminary data indicate that
adult Danionella school based on vision alone, which allows for precise experimental control over naturalistic
social stimuli in the lab. By leveraging these unique attributes, here we propose to investigate the brain-wide
networks that underlie the development of biological motion perception – and its dysfunction in genetic
models of ASD – using a novel combination of multi-animal posture tracking across the development of
collective behavior, Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) tasks, brain-wide cellular-level functional
imaging, and Crispr-Cas knockout of ASD-associated genes. My lab will apply this multidisciplinary approach
to identify the developmental progression of biological motion processing and coordinated group behavior,
the multi-regional neural populations that encode the visual perception of conspecific actions and drive
appropriate orienting responses, and the dysfunction of developing neural circuits and group behavior in
multiple genetic models of ASD. By establishing this model system for social maturation and focusing on
neural circuits that are conserved across vertebrates, our work will facilitate the rapid discovery of brain-wide
functional motifs related to typical and pathological development in ASD.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10687450
- **Project number:** 1DP2EY036251-01
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO
- **Principal Investigator:** Matthew Lovett-Barron
- **Activity code:** DP2 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2023
- **Award amount:** $1,378,728
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2023-09-30 → 2026-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10687450

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10687450, Functional maturation of neural circuits for biological motion perception and social engagement (1DP2EY036251-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10687450. Licensed CC0.

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