Detection of Anticipatory Dynamics between a pair of Zebra Fish

Chi-An Lin¹, Chi-Keung Chan^1*

¹Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan

* Presenter:Chi-Keung Chan, email:ckchan@gate.sinica.edu.tw

Anticipatory dynamics (AD) is unusual in that causal events are not necessarily ordered by time. Trajectories from a pair of interacting Zebra fish are used to test for the existence of AD in natural systems. Although temporal order between the fish can be ambiguous for causality, their causal order can still be established if the direction of information flow (DIF) is known. In order to obtain DIF, we have made use of the difference of the transfer entropy (TE) between the fish with a history length established by experiments with known DIF. Our experiments indicate that AD can be observed much more often in fish pairs of opposite genders; with the females being most likely to be anticipatory. This last finding shows that although females are seemingly leading in actions, the males are actually in control.

Keywords: anticipatory dynamics, zebra fish, mutual information, transfer entropy, causality