Link to bioRxiv paper: http://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2020.09.19.304774v1?rss=1 Authors: Sakagiannis, P., Aguilera, M., Nawrot, M. P. Abstract: The behavior of many living organisms is not continuous. Rather, activity emerges in bouts that are separated by epochs of rest, a phenomenon known as intermittent behavior. Although intermittency is ubiquitous across phyla, empirical studies are scarce and the underlying neural mechanisms remain unknown. Here we reproduce empirical evidence of intermittency during Drosophila larva free exploration. Our findings are in line with previously reported power-law distributed rest-bout durations while we report log-normal distributed activity-bout durations. We show that a stochastic network model can transition between power-law and non-power-law distributed states and we suggest a plausible neural mechanism for the alternating rest and activity in the larva. Finally, we discuss possible implementations in behavioral simulations extending spatial Levy-walk or coupled-oscillator models with temporal intermittency. Copy rights belong to original authors. Visit the link for more info