Research programme
Research
Developing mechanistic accounts of animal behaviour grounded in ethological observation—explaining how sensory information is generated, selected, and transformed into action across neural, individual, collective, and evolutionary scales.
The perspective
Behaviour as an unfolding process, more than an observable pattern.
Animals do not passively receive a complete representation of the world. They move, orient sensory structures, produce signals, select relevant information, and decide when and how to act. Each action changes the conditions of the next observation.
My research seeks causal explanations for this continuous exchange. I develop models that make precise behavioural predictions, measure the resulting actions and reactions, and test how the process is bounded by morphology, locomotion, environmental structure, interaction, and physical law.
A causal framework
From sensing to action—and back again
Cognition becomes experimentally tractable when the links between information, decision, and action are expressed as measurable processes.
Configure
Morphology and movement shape the sensory field.
Acquire
Sampling determines which information becomes available.
Evaluate
Context, expectation, and internal state establish relevance.
Act
A behavioural decision changes the animal–world relationship.
Interact
Other agents reshape the information available to the individual.
Research directions
One programme across interacting scales
I
Embodied perception
Morphosensory dynamics
I study how movable and deformable sensory structures, acoustic gaze, body orientation, and locomotion actively transform the information an animal can acquire. In echolocating bats, this includes the dynamic geometry of emission and reception rather than treating the sonar apparatus as fixed.
II
Cognition and control
Responsivity, information selection, and decision
My responsivity framework describes active sensing as a sequence of delayed information–action cycles. It provides a way to test which echo, object, or information window governs the next sensory action, and how expectation, uncertainty, movement, and finite response time give rise to behavioural organisation.
III
From individuals to groups
Collective active sensing
At the collective scale, every sensing individual also changes the sensory world of others. I investigate how local interactions, delayed responses, masking, and probabilistic access to information produce cohesion, reorganisation, or fragmentation without requiring central coordination.
IV
The larger picture
Comparative and evolutionary ethology
Morphology, sensory capacity, locomotion, ecology, and life history move the boundaries of what an animal can perceive and do. I aim to explain how these differences generate alternative behavioural solutions across species, environments, and evolutionary histories.
Explanatory reach
Connecting levels rather than isolating them
Neural circuits and physiological mechanisms, approached through testable theory and collaboration.
Perception, attention, prediction, decision, and sensorimotor control during natural behaviour.
Information flow and behavioural organisation among interacting sensing agents.
How ecological niches and life histories shape different sensory and behavioural solutions.
A measurable model of active sensing
Why echolocation?
Echolocating bats make the structure of active sensing unusually accessible. Every call marks an act of information acquisition; its echoes expose the delays and geometry of the sensory world; and the next call and movement reveal how the animal updates behaviour.
Bats will remain my principal empirical model. The theory, however, is intended to travel. Comparative work across bat species—and eventually other echolocating animals, including odontocetes—can reveal which principles are general and which emerge from a particular body, habitat, or life history.
Governing principle
Before asking what a behaviour optimises, ask what information and action are physically, temporally, and biologically feasible.
Immediate frontier
The morphosensory dynamics of perception
My next direction brings morphology, sensory timing, and behavioural decision into the same causal framework.
I aim to determine how movements and transformations of sensory structures reorganise the information available through echolocation, and how those changes influence subsequent sensing and action.
Responsivity provides the temporal framework for following this process as it unfolds. Combined with measurements of acoustic geometry and behaviour, it can generate causal predictions about when information becomes available, what the animal selects, and how the next decision changes the sensory scene.
The enabling arm
Theory that can be tested
A theoretical account becomes useful when it generates discriminating predictions—and when the means exist to perform the required experiment.
Alongside biological theory, I develop open hardware, acquisition systems, simulations, analytical software, and reproducible datasets. BATSY4-Pro and ESPERDYNE support accessible field recording; RUBAT Studio enables multichannel acquisition and experimental control; WAH and WAH-i connect array design to measurable spatial accuracy; and the responsivity, swarm, and water-foraging toolkits make theoretical assumptions explicit and testable.