Bittu 

"I am interested in behaviour, neuroscience, ecology and evolution. I work on various puzzles in animal communication, sensation and cognition.

I work on understanding the relationship between signal production and signal reception systems involved in animal communication, especially when it comes to acoustic and vibratory communication in bushcrickets. I am interested in the question of how characteristics of the song production and auditory systems are matched for effective communication, how listeners recognize the call produced by callers of their species and distinguish it from the songs of other species, how both singers and listeners deal with acoustic masking by noise, how listeners localize and figure out the direction in which to move to locate a caller, and vitally, how they deal with predators and parasites which eavesdrop on the communication cycle to find their targets. I am now interested in looking at these questions and others relating to how genes and neural circuits affecting calling and listening behaviour drive evolutionary change and speciation in some various species of Orthopterans. This kind of work holds promise in acoustic monitoring of species diversity in forests.

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Quantitative cognition: I am interested in the question of how mathematical cues are learned and processed, and in the question of whether logical inference emerges spontaneously or in the context of reward driven learning. I am also interested in the question of what kinds of computations neural hardwire can perform with relative ease. We look at this question relative to various ecological factors in two systems: zebrafish and semi-ferral dogs. We are training zebrafish in the lab on mathematical tasks  to eventually study the neural basis of such cognition using calcium imaging in larval zebrafish. Some of these tasks are also shaped by our interest in behavioural economics, driven by a collaboration. Our goal in studying this question in dogs is to explore the possibility of large scale citizen science based data collection on the question of mathematical cognition and inference in animals with whom humans have a relatively strong behavioural understanding, and who are wild enough to benefit from strong learning abilities. For now this is work that undergraduates carry out with dogs around the campus.

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