Looking for paper suggestions!
I'm teaching a class in Neuroecology for first year PhD students and part of it is a journal club.
I'm looking for additional, pure behavior papers that study "natural" / ecological behaviors, if possible not in mice.
And also for rather short papers that perform any form of brain recordings during natural /ecological behaviors (plus points if not in mice).
Any suggestions?
#Neuroecology #behaviors #neuroscience #teaching
@Katja_Reinhard I’m afraid that any paper that does both “ecological behaviour” and neural recordings would be anything but short… also super rare, but it depends what you mean by “ecological”.
For example I like to use this paper in journal clubs because it has some obvious flaws: Social place-cells in the bat hippocampus - but is it ecological? Not really - it’s recorded in a lab during a human-made task…
Happy to provide more examples if you can narrow down a bit what you mean by ecological! :)
@Katja_Reinhard @elduvelle Example publication using 2p calcium-dye imaging to better understand plasticity of antennal lobe for ecologically relevant odor learning tasks:
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/29/33/10191.short
And two more as well:
Odors evoke complex spatiotemporal responses in the insect antennal lobe (AL) and mammalian olfactory bulb. However, the behavioral relevance of spatiotemporal coding remains unclear. In the present work we combined behavioral analyses with calcium imaging of odor induced activity in the honeybee AL to evaluate the relevance of this temporal dimension in the olfactory code. We used a new way for evaluation of odor similarity of binary mixtures in behavioral studies, which involved testing whether a match of odor-sampling time is necessary between training and testing conditions for odor recognition during associative learning. Using graded changes in the similarity of the mixture ratios, we found high correlations between the behavioral generalization across those mixtures and a gradient of activation in AL output. Furthermore, short odor stimuli of 500 ms or less affected how well odors were matched with a memory template, and this time corresponded to a shift from a sampling-time-dependent to a sampling-time-independent memory. Accordingly, 375 ms corresponded to the time required for spatiotemporal AL activity patterns to reach maximal separation according to imaging studies. Finally, we compared spatiotemporal representations of binary mixtures in trained and untrained animals. AL activity was modified by conditioning to improve separation of odor representations. These data suggest that one role of reinforcement is to “tune” the AL such that relevant odors become more discriminable.
@Katja_Reinhard this sounds like neuroethology to me (or is there a difference?). There are textbooks with lots of examples and references: "The Neuroethology of Predation and Escape" is one, "Neuroethology
An Introduction to the Neurophysiological Fundamentals of Behavior" is another one.
Konishi's work on learning in songbirds, Knudsen's work on audio-spatial localization in barn owls, Narin's work on frog calls, ... there is a lot to draw from and it's a fun topic. Best wishes on the class!
@sls I call my course Neuroecology because we also discuss the environment that influences or selected for certain behaviors.
Indeed, I've gone through several books and the examples there are used in my lectures to explain concepts, but it has turned out to be less trivial than expected to find papers where animals aren't taught/rewarded, that have both high quality behavior and high quality neural data (with interesting analysis), don't focus on manipulations, and aren't too complicated to present in a reasonable amount of time for a first year PhD student.
I'll check out the frog calls and barn owls though, I don't think I went through those yet.
The JCs that are part of this course focus on discussing if/why the tested behaviors are natural, the appropriateness of the assay and analysis, and the possible confounders and impact of the experimental environment. Last year's discussions have been excellent and I hope to renew my paper selection for this edition.
@Katja_Reinhard You may be interested in Antoine Wystrach's work on ant navigation. I think there's neurobiological studies as well as behavioural ones in natural conditions in his work.
An exemple : https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/215/1/44/10799/Ants-might-use-different-view-matching-strategies
SUMMARYIndividual foraging ants are known to rely on views of their surroundings for route learning and for pinpointing goals. Different strategies have been proposed to explain how ants might process visual information for navigation, but little is known about the actual development and nature of the view-based strategies used by ants in complex natural environments. Here, we constrained the knowledge of Melophorus bagoti ants to either the nest vicinity or a curved route (length 10 m) and analysed their initial direction when released at both novel and familiar locations. In parallel, we used 360 deg pictures of the scene as a basis for modelling different navigational strategies. We propose here a new hypothesis based on skyline height comparison to explain how ants home from novel locations. Interestingly, this strategy succeeded well at novel locations but failed on familiar terrain. By contrast, the use of a visual compass strategy failed at novel locations but could explain the results on familiar routes. We suggest that ants might switch between skyline height comparison and a visual compass strategy, depending on whether they are on familiar terrain or not. How ants could switch between strategies and how their memories develop are discussed in turn.
@Katja_Reinhard Nowadays labs transitioning from model lab mice to ml model mice: So adding more abstraction layers from biological ecological reality!
Key question! please follow w/ listing outside-the-lab research!
No refs, but fieldwork research with wales and/or macaques speaking/singing...
#LarsChittka lab team top creative & innovative #bees fieldworks:
#hivemind vs indiv. #mind!
ie: capture & install of tiny antenna x harmonic radar individuals tracking
Most of us are aware of the hive mind — the power of bees as an amazing collective. But do we know how uniquely intelligent bees are as individuals? In this lecture Lars Chittka explores the bees' remarkable cognitive abilities. You will learn that they are profoundly smart, have distinct personalities, can recognize flowers and human faces, exhibit basic emotions, count, use simple tools, solve problems, and learn by observing others. They may even possess consciousness. He will take you deep into the sensory world of bees, and illustrate how bee brains are unparalleled in the animal kingdom in terms of how much sophisticated material is packed into their tiny nervous systems. He will also examine the psychological differences between bees and the ethical dilemmas that arise in conservation and laboratory settings because bees feel and think. Exploring an insect whose sensory experiences rival those of humans, he will explore the singular abilities of some of the world’s most incredible creatures. Lars Chittka FLS, FRES, FRSB is a professor at Queen Mary, University of London, where he founded a new Research Centre for Psychology in 2008, and was its scientific director until 2012. Chittka is a world authority on the behaviour, cognition and ecology of bumblebees and honeybees, and their interactions with flowers. He discovered that bees can count, learn by observing each other and have a rich inner world of sensations and memories. Chittka is a recipient of the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (2014), an ERC Advanced Grant (2013) and the Lesley Goodman Award of the Royal Entomological Society (2006). The Linnean Society works to inform, involve and inspire people of all ages about nature and its wider interactions through our collections, programmes and publications. Founded in 1788, the Society takes its name from the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778). https://www.linnean.org Follow us on social media: https://www.twitter.com/LinneanSociety https://www.instagram.com/linneansociety https://www.facebook.com/linneansociety
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