Behavioral neuroscience examines the neural bases of behavior and cognition. It consists of three stages: a) characterization of a specific behavior; b) identification of possible neurobiological substrates; c) investigation of the mechanisms relating the neurobiological substrate and the behavior. In the past century, behavioral neuroscience has focused on establishing a universal animal model, simplifying behavioral tasks to be practically performed in laboratory settings, and standardizing behavioral tests.

Currently, mice and rats are the most commonly used animal models in behavioral neuroscience research and highly-standardized behavioral tests relying on human-trained behaviors instructed through rewards or punishments are commonly used to assess behavior. This methodological approach has the advantage of employing the same animal subject and same behavioral procedure across laboratories, ensuring that the same variable is being measured.

There are however some drawbacks. First, the employment of just one or two model species may lead to a lack of generalizability. Mice and rats alone cannot model all behaviors in the biological world. Even considering only the behaviors that can be directly translated to humans, mice and rats still are not always the most suitable models.

Second, the adaptation of behavioral tasks to the requirements of the laboratory setting may lead to artificial tasks, which have a weak or no relation with the actual behaviors normally produced by the tested species in their natural environment and socio-ecological context, hence lowering the validity of the test. Employing the wrong organism to model a specific function may limit not only the ethological validity of the results but also the overall interpretation and the translational value.

Finally, tailoring behavioral tests on laboratory and experimenter practicality rather than on the species-specific trends and instincts of the tested subjects may lead to poor animal welfare, which may generate unpredictable and unique behavioral reactions that can increase the variability of the experimental results and undermine their reproducibility.

An alternative to classical behavioral neuroscience testing and its methodological drawbacks (scarce generalizability of results obtained from a single species, artificiality of behavioral tests that are not based on natural species-specific attitudes, impact on animal welfare) is offered by ethological neuroscience, which adopts knowledge of the natural behavior of animals in the wild to develop animal models of behavior and behavioral tests for neuroscience research.

We propose ten fundamental aims for ethological neuroscience:

1. species diversification of animal models;
2. optimizing ethological validity by using ethological behavioral tests, i.e. based on natural motivators and behaviors that the species exhibit in their natural habitat, particularly spontaneous behaviors (e.g. the natural hole-poking tendency of mice can be used to test memory in the hole-board test, the food-hoarding of hamsters to test hoarding behavior, the nest-building of rodents to test analogs of obsessive and anxiety-related psychiatric diseases, the complex singing of songbirds to model some aspects of language, the coordinated movements of flocks of birds or shoals of fish to model the relationships between the individual and the social system, etc);
3. using the ethological knowledge of the animal kingdom to choose, for each specific behavioral task, the most appropriate animal model;
4. tailoring behavioral tasks to the natural dispositions of the tested species;
5. performing behavioral tests in a context optimizing the expression of the suite of natural behaviors of the given species (seminatural environments, automated home-cage behavioral systems, social enrichment, etc.);
6. investigating, using a naturalistic approach, the neural and psychological underpinnings of behavior in wildlife (i.e. free-living non-human animals);
7. exploring how different ecological, sensorial and social factors of the environment can cause hormonal and neurobiological changes affecting the functions of the nervous system, including cognition and behavior;
8. promoting, in the laboratory and nature, the use of non-invasive methods (e.g. wearable neurologgers, animal-borne audio-sensors and video-cameras, radio-collars, aerial and underwater drones, home-cage video-cameras with AI-mediated behavior recognition systems, non-invasive EEG and ERP electrophysiology, fMRI, PET, functional near-infrared spectroscopy, functional ultrasound and optoacoustic imaging, etc…), to minimize the disruptive effects of stress on behavior and maximize animal welfare;
9. proposing and testing hypotheses to explain the origin of specific behaviors in terms of evolutionary adaptations of the nervous system to the ecological, social and sensory context of the natural habitat of the studied species;
10. exploring the translational potential of species-specific neuro-behavioral adaptations to treat or prevent human neurological disorders (e.g. the molecular signaling of the mammalian hibernating brain to obtain ischemic resistance, or the neuroanatomy of wood-pecking birds to prevent traumatic brain injury).

This Research Topic welcomes articles applying the ethological approach in behavioral neuroscience to investigate any aspect of cognition (e.g. learning, memory, spatial orientation, quantity discrimination, etc) and behavior (e.g. courtship, parental behavior, cooperative behavior, agonistic behavior, foraging, hunting, tool use, etc), with an eye to advancements in technologies, methods, and paradigms.

Works employing non-conventional rodent models (such as hamsters, guinea pigs, voles, gerbils, degus, and deer mice), as well as non-mammalian models (in particular from avian neuroscience, fish neuroscience and reptile neuroscience) are encouraged.

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Ethological neuroscience