PoseR, a plugin designed to accelerate the analysis of animal behaviors. It simplifies the process of training deep learning behavioral classifiers for a wide range of applications. Credit: Maarten Zwart

Researchers from the University of St Andrews have developed an AI tool that reads animal movement from video and turns it into clear, human-readable descriptions, making behavioral analysis faster, cheaper, and scalable across species.

The PoseR plug has been developed to remove a major bottleneck in neuroscience, psychology and biology to enable larger, faster, and more reproducible studies. The work is published in Open Biology.

Animal behavior is a window into how their brains work, or not, in the case of disease. Traditionally, scientists have spent hours manually scoring videos to analyze behavior, often taking weeks or months per project. Speeding this up can therefore have a big impact.

How the AI tool works

This new breakthrough makes behavior analysis much faster and more consistent, helping researchers study animal actions and brain function more efficiently.

The AI tool uses a method called "Graph Neural Networks." These networks can be fed data in the shape of graphs which correspond to the varying shapes of animals. It allows the user to determine what the subjects in the recording are doing, and gives categories of behavior.

PoseR, a plugin designed to accelerate the analysis of animal behaviours. It simplifies the process of training deep learning behavioral classifiers for a wide range of applications. Credit: Maarten Zwart

The tool was developed by a team of researchers led by Dr. Maarten Zwart from St Andrews School of Psychology and Neuroscience, whose research looks at how the brain produces behavior. They are particularly interested in how movements are produced, and using this tool will speed up their analyses.

He said, "Our team aims to find out how the brain and spinal cord interact to produce all the different movements that we and other animals make. This tool, which started as a COVID lockdown project, is an exciting new development driven by Dr. Pierce Mullen, along with Dr. Holly Armstrong, our research technician, and two amazing undergraduate researchers, Beatrice Bowlby and Angus Gray."

It’s hoped that by removing a major bottleneck in neuroscience, psychology and biology, it will enable larger, faster, and more reproducible studies as well as rapid screening of animal models for disease and, thus, eventually make it easier to make fundamental discoveries and find cures for neurological diseases.

Publication details

PoseR: a deep learning toolbox for classifying animal behaviour, Open Biology (2026). DOI: 10.1098/rsob.250322

Citation: New AI tool removes bottleneck in animal movement analysis (2026, January 20) retrieved 20 January 2026 from https://phys.org/news/2026-01-ai-tool-bottleneck-animal-movement.html

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