Behavior of Organisms Laboratory, Instituto de Neurociencias CSIC-UMH, 03550 Alicante, Spain.
Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA; Departments of Psychology and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
Neuron. 2019 Oct 9;104(1):25-36. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2019.09.017.
Neuroscience needs behavior. However, it is daunting to render the behavior of organisms intelligible without suppressing most, if not all, references to life. When animals are treated as passive stimulus-response, disembodied and identical machines, the life of behavior perishes. Here, we distill three biological principles (materiality, agency, and historicity), spell out their consequences for the study of animal behavior, and illustrate them with various examples from the literature. We propose to put behavior back into context, with the brain in a species-typical body and with the animal's body situated in the world; stamp Newtonian time with nested ontogenetic and phylogenetic processes that give rise to individuals with their own histories; and supplement linear cause-and-effect chains and information processing with circular loops of purpose and meaning. We believe that conceiving behavior in these ways is imperative for neuroscience.
神经科学需要行为。然而，如果不压制对生命的大部分（如果不是全部）的提及，将生物体的行为理解为智能行为是令人望而生畏的。当动物被视为被动的刺激-反应、无生命的、相同的机器时，行为的生命就会消逝。在这里，我们提炼了三个生物学原则（物质性、能动性和历史性），阐述了它们对动物行为研究的影响，并通过文献中的各种例子进行了说明。我们建议将行为放回背景中，让大脑处于典型的物种身体中，让动物的身体处于世界中；用嵌套的个体发生和系统发生过程给牛顿时间打上烙印，这些过程产生了具有自己历史的个体；用目的和意义的循环回路来补充线性因果关系和信息处理。我们相信，以这种方式构思行为对神经科学至关重要。
