Systems Neuroscience of Natural Behaviors in Rodents

Abstract

Animals evolved in complex environments, producing a wide range of behaviors, including navigation, foraging, prey capture, and conspecific interactions, which vary over timescales ranging from milliseconds to days. Historically, these behaviors have been the focus of study for ecology and ethology, while systems neuroscience has largely focused on short timescale behaviors that can be repeated thousands of times and occur in highly artificial environments.Thanks to recent advances in machine learning, miniaturization, and computation, it is newly possible to study freely-moving animals in more natural conditions while applying systems techniques: performing temporally-specific perturbations, modeling behavioral strategies, and recording from large numbers of neurons while animals are freely moving. The authors of this review are a group of scientists with deep appreciation for the common aims of systems neuroscience, ecology, and ethology. We believe it is an extremely exciting time to be a neuroscientist, as we have an opportunity to grow as a field, to embrace interdisciplinary, open, collaborative research to provide new insights and allow researchers to link knowledge across disciplines, species, and scales. Here we discuss the origins of ethology, ecology, and systems neuroscience in the context of our own work and highlight how combining approaches across these fields has provided fresh insights into our research. We hope this review facilitates some of these interactions and alliances and helps us all do even better science, together.

Refocusing neuroscience: moving away from mental categories and towards complex behaviours

“…As pointedly summarized by Fultot et al [106]: the organism is viewed as a 'seeker of stimulation rather than that of a processor of it'. Thus, to elucidate families of brain processes requires situating them in the context of 'complex naturalistic behaviour' (for a recent multi-author discussion, see [107]).…”

“…Whereas these topics overlap rather little with those motivated by cognitive psychology, other lists of ecological themes are probably more familiar to a wider group of neuroscientists: signal detection, signal localization, memory acquisition, storage and recall, motivation, coordination and top-down control [112]. Indeed, some investigators have proposed combining ethological approaches with traditional systems neuroscience, in particular by studying complex behaviours in more natural conditions while recording movement, performing temporally specific perturbations and recording from large numbers of neurons during freely moving behaviours [107].…”

Female behavior drives the formation of distinct social structures in C57BL/6J versus wild-derived outbred mice in field enclosures

“…While controlled conditions are necessary for many experiments, there has been a growing recognition that indoor lab environments limit our ability to understand many complex biological processes [7][8][9] . This motivation is especially strong in neuroscience, where a growing number of researchers have highlighted a need to study the brain and behavior in enriched environments that can elicit an animal's full repertoire of natural behaviors [10][11][12][13][14][15][16] . Constrained lab environments inherently limit the study of patterns of space use or social behavior that require realistic natural spatial scales relevant to the organism.…”

Large-scale capture of hidden fluorescent labels for training generalizable markerless motion capture models

“…With more versatile and automated pose estimation tools, behavioral research fields are generating rapidly growing amounts of movement data. Analytical techniques that can make sense of this type of motion data, several of which have already been developed [51][52][53][54][55] , will continue to grow in usefulness. For example, techniques that can detect and characterize subtle changes in movement during early stages of disease could impact how prodromal pathology is detected and how therapeutic interventions are evaluated.…”