Biological Motion as an Innate Perceptual Mechanism Driving Social Affiliation

Collective behavior, such as shoaling in teleost fish, is driven by the perceptual recognition of conspecific animals. Because social interactions are mutual, it has been difficult to disentangle the exact sensory cues that trigger affiliation in the first place from those that are emitted by receptive and responsive shoal mates. Here, we overcome this challenge in a virtual reality assay in zebrafish. We discovered that simple visual features...