Introduction to the presidential symposium at the International Congress of Neuroethology, ICN 2018 in Brisbane, Australia
The articles in this section of the present issue of Journal of Comparative Physiology-A are from speakers at the 2nd Presidential Symposium of the Congress of the International Society for Neuroethology in Brisbane in June 2018. The speakers were invited to represent the diversity of research that can fall under the heading of Neuroethology. Speakers were chosen for the excellence of their research, for their ability to communicate the excitement and importance of the study of behavior, and to challenge the audience to think about behavior in new and different ways. Speakers were also requested to provide an article for JCP-A. A substantial portion of the travel costs for the Presidential Symposium speakers attending the Congress was offset by Springer-Verlag as well as by the International Society for Neuroethology and a generous personal contribution from Professor Friedrich and Ortrun Barth. We hope that these contributors (and others) will continue their critical support for the Presidential Symposium in future Congresses of the International Society of Neuroethology. The symposium serves as a kick-off for the meeting and sets the tone to top-quality presentations and exciting science. Neuroethology strives to understand the neural basis of naturally occurring behavior. Understanding behavior is critical to understanding neuroscience in the context that behavior is the ultimate phenotype, the final read-out of the nervous system, and a primary target of evolution. For the uninitiated, behavior seems simple—however, modern techniques for studying behavior have shown us that the majority of behaviors have many, many degrees of freedom, and that a single behavior can serve multiple functions. In any given moment, behavior is sculpted by the nervous system, by the animals’ experience, possibly the experience of the animals’ parents and grandparents, and by the environment, and these are all impacted by the animals’ evolutionary history. Although many researchers study behavior as part of their research programs, the hallmark of a neuroethologist is a focus on behavior and how a behavior is adaptive for the organism. In studies aimed at understanding the genetic and neural bases of behavior, the key is to keep going back to the behavior under study at every step along the way, confirming that the properties of the putative underlying mechanisms match the properties of the behavior. A 2017 position paper in Neuron by Krakauer et al. was titled “Neuroscience Needs Behavior: Correcting a Reductionist Bias”, that was based on the premise that “Behavior is complex and nuanced. To really understand complexities of behavior one must see it as a meaningful endpoint and not a simple single binary unit.” To effectively study behavior, it begins with observing a simple behavior and thinking about how it can be operationally defined. Start the study using that operational definition; however, let the data refine your definition of the behavior as often as is necessary—as your understanding of the behavior grows, the definition may also evolve. Operationally defining behavior is a critical part of studying behavior. How you define the behavior will determine the results you find! Too often these days in neuroscience, the holy grail is “mechanism”, and behavior is seen as a simple observation that begins the quest for mechanism. Rarely are the mechanistic elements tested against the behavior to ensure that the features of the mechanisms (timing, intensity, frequency, etc.) match up with the parameters of the behavior. While perhaps easier to do poorly, studying behavior is at least as complicated and tricky to get right as physiology or molecular biology—for example, tossing a mouse in a Morris Water Maze and measuring time to reach the platform are not as simple as it might outwardly seem. There are many cautionary tales of drowning mice, of effects of water temperature on performance, small environmental cues unnoticed by the experimenter that the mice can use. Good studies of behavior require a thorough * Catharine H. Rankin crankin@psych.ubc.ca