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Neuroethology is the evolutionary and comparative approach to the study of animal behavior and its underlying mechanistic control by the nervous system.〔Hoyle, G. (1984) The scope of Neuroethology. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 7:367-412.〕〔Ewert, P. (1980) Neuroethology. Springer-Verlag. New York.〕〔Camhi, J. (1984) Neuroethology. Sinauer. Sunderland Mass.〕 This interdisciplinary branch of behavioral neuroscience endeavors to understand how the central nervous system translates biologically relevant stimuli into natural behavior. For example, many bats are capable of echolocation which is used for prey capture and navigation. The auditory system of bats is often cited as an example for how acoustic properties of sounds can be converted into a sensory map of behaviorally relevant features of sounds.〔Suga, N. (1989). "Principles of auditory information-processing derived from neuroethology." J Exp Biol 146: 277-86.〕 Neuroethologists hope to uncover general principles of the nervous system from the study of animals with exaggerated or specialized behaviors. As its name implies, neuroethology is a multidisciplinary field composed of neurobiology (the study of the nervous system) and ethology (the study of behavior in natural conditions). A central theme of the field of neuroethology, delineating it from other branches of neuroscience, is this focus on natural behavior. Natural behaviors may be thought of as those behaviors generated through means of natural selection (i.e. finding mates, navigation, locomotion, predator avoidance) rather than behaviors in disease states, or behavioral tasks that are particular to the laboratory. ==Philosophy== Neuroethology is an integrative approach to the study of animal behavior that draws upon several disciplines. Its approach stems from the theory that animals' nervous systems have evolved to address problems of sensing and acting in certain environmental niches and that their nervous systems are best understood in the context of the problems they have evolved to solve. In accordance with Krogh's principle, neuroethologists often study animals that are “specialists” in the behavior the researcher wishes to study e.g. honeybees and social behavior, bat echolocation, owl sound localization, etc. The scope of neuroethological inquiry might be summarized by Jörg-Peter Ewert, a pioneer of neuroethology, when he considers the types of questions central to neuroethology in his 1980 introductory text to the field: # How are stimuli detected by an organism? # How are environmental stimuli in the external world represented in the nervous system? # How is information about a stimulus acquired, stored and recalled by the nervous system? # How is a behavioral pattern encoded by neural networks? # How is behavior coordinated and controlled by the nervous system? # How can the ontogenetic development of behavior be related to neural mechanisms? Often central to addressing questions in neuroethology are comparative methodologies, drawing upon knowledge about related organisms’ nervous systems, anatomies, life histories, behaviors and environmental niches. While it is not unusual for many types of neurobiology experiments to give rise to behavioral questions, many neuroethologists often begin their research programs by observing a species’ behavior in its natural environment. Other approaches to understanding nervous systems include the systems identification approach, popular in engineering. The idea is to stimulate the system using a non-natural stimulus with certain properties. The system's response to the stimulus may be used to analyze the operation of the system. Such an approach is useful for linear systems, but the nervous system is notoriously nonlinear, and neuroethologists argue that such an approach is limited. This argument is supported by experiments in the auditory system. These experiments show that neural responses to complex sounds, like social calls, can not be predicted by the knowledge gained from studying the responses due to pure tones (one of the non-natural stimuli favored by auditory neurophysiologists). This is because of the non-linearity of the system. Modern neuroethology is largely influenced by the research techniques used. Neural approaches are necessarily very diverse, as is evident through the variety of questions asked, measuring techniques used, relationships explored, and model systems employed. Techniques utilized since 1984 include the use of intracellular dyes, which make maps of identified neurons possible, and the use of brain slices, which bring vertebrate brains into better observation through intracellular electrodes (Hoyle 1984). Currently, other fields toward which neuroethology may be headed include computational neuroscience, molecular genetics, neuroendocrinology and epigenetics. The existing field of neural modeling may also expand into neuroethological terrain, due to its practical uses in robotics. In all this, neuroethologists must use the right level of simplicity to effectively guide research towards accomplishing the goals of neuroethology. Critics of neuroethology might consider it a branch of neuroscience concerned with ‘animal trivia’. Though neuroethological subjects tend not to be traditional neurobiological model systems (i.e. ''Drosophila'', ''C. elegans'', or ''Danio rerio''), neuroethological approaches emphasizing comparative methods have uncovered many concepts central to neuroscience as a whole, such as lateral inhibition, coincidence detection, and sensory maps. The discipline of neuroethology has also discovered and explained the only vertebrate behavior for which the entire neural circuit has been described: the electric fish jamming avoidance response. Beyond its conceptual contributions, neuroethology makes indirect contributions to advancing human health. By understanding simpler nervous systems, many clinicians have used concepts uncovered by neuroethology and other branches of neuroscience to develop treatments for devastating human diseases. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Neuroethology」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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