The Journal of Neuroscience, February 3, 2021 • 41(5):911–919 • 911

Symposium/Mini-Symposium

Systems Neuroscience of Natural Behaviors in Rodents

Emily Jane Dennis,1 Ahmed El Hady,1 Angie Michaiel,2 Ann Clemens,3 Dougal R. Gowan Tervo,4
Jakob Voigts,5 and Sandeep Robert Datta6
1
Princeton University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Princeton, New Jersey, 08540, 2University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, 97403-1254,
3
University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, EH8 9JZ, 4Janelia Research Campus, Ashburn, Virginia, 20147, 5Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Cambridge, Massachusets, 02139, and 6Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusets, 02115

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 record-
ing 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 dis-
cuss 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.
Key words: systems neuroscience; behavioral ecology; ethology; rodents; natural behavior

Introduction using a mathematical formulation. A model might add together,

In the 1970s, the nascent field of systems neuroscience was built for example, effects of sensory adaptation, the individual stimuli
on the framework of systems theory, especially cybernetics presented, the timing of those stimuli, and the “noisiness” of the
(Wiener, 1965) and functional systems theory (Anokhin, 1984). animal’s memory and perception. This allows precise quantifica-
These approaches were holistic and heavily influenced by mathe- tion of multiple aspects of the computation under study, and can
matics, focusing on hierarchies, dynamics, analytics, and com- help identify neurobiological correlates of internal variables,
puter simulations (Metzler and Arbib, 1977). To this day, the such as the current “belief” of the animal as it progresses through
heavy interplay between theory, mathematics, and neurophysio- each trial and across trials. High trial counts are necessary when
logical recordings continues to define the field. A common sys- constructing and comparing behavioral models: each model pa-
tems approach to behavior involves designing a task where an rameter must be fit to the data, and lots and lots of data points
animal is trained to produce a response, such as press a lever or are required to decrease the error in parameter estimation to
move their eyes, to a set of stimuli. This is far removed from nat- make well-founded comparisons.
urally observed behaviors. How did this become common? The need for large datasets with many repeated trials of the
Typically, a task is designed to try to isolate a specific compu- same type becomes even more important if the end goal is to re-
tation that an animal will repeat many times each day. One com- cord and perturb neural circuits during the task, to identify how
mon experimental design is called the two-alternative forced populations of neurons can support the computation under
choice. An animal looks or moves to the left or right after the study, or identify key brain regions that support the response.
stimulus, and they are rewarded based on a learned “rule” (e.g., Up until quite recently, we could only record from a few neurons
go left if you heard more sounds on the left). Animals will com- at a time, and even today whole-nervous system imaging is rare,
plete tens to thousands of trials per day, and we can then use the extremely difficult, and limited to a few species (Ahrens et al.,
wealth of data acquired from these tasks to model the behavior, 2013; Nguyen et al., 2016). Therefore, the ability to average over
lots of stimulus presentations is crucial. Furthermore, many
Received July 19, 2020; revised Oct. 15, 2020; accepted Oct. 20, 2020.
methods used (e.g., 2-photon imaging and electrophysiology)
J.V. is a cofounder of Open Ephys. S.R.D. is a cofounder of Syllable Life Sciences, Abelian Therapeutics and have historically required head-fixation of the animals to
Optogenix, Inc. The remaining authors declare no competing financial interests. decrease movement or to allow use of large technologies that are
We thank Mae Guthman, Emily Mackavicius, Alain St. Pierre, Adam Calhoun, and Manuel Schottdorf for too heavy to mount to a freely moving animal’s head (Juczewski
reading recommendations.
Correspondence should be addressed to Emily Jane Dennis at [email protected].
et al., 2020).
https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1877-20.2020 Using these techniques, systems neuroscience has made great
Copyright © 2021 the authors progress in identifying neural signatures of task-related activity
912 • J. Neurosci., February 3, 2021 • 41(5):911–919 Dennis et al. · Systems Neuroscience of Natural Behaviors in Rodents

and documenting the effects of perturbations, providing insight processing (Konishi, 2003) and learning (Nottebohm, 2005) and
into how neural populations can reflect the internal computa- the evolution of circuit organization (Sakurai and Katz, 2017).
tions that animals perform. However, the benefits of careful con- Yet this approach also has its limits. Restricting ourselves to
trol of stimulus delivery, repeated trial types, and large recording champion organisms makes it more difficult to generalize results
technologies come at a cost. Teaching animals artificial response- and communicate across disciplinary and species boundaries.
stimulus pairings usually takes weeks or months. Animals are Model organisms may have been chosen for ease of use and to
often extremely restricted in their movement, and other aspects model human pathologies, but they are, arguably, also cham-
(e.g., motivational state or body movements) are often ignored. pions. Rats and mice are champion generalists, they exhibit a
More and more studies are acknowledging the downsides of huge range of behavioral variability and the ability to adapt to
ignoring these aspects: even in head fixed-animals, “spurious” almost any environment, no matter how wild or artificial: from
movements contribute to, and are often necessary for, interpret- the sewers of New York City, to grain silos, to the wilds, one can
ing neural activity during a task (Gilad et al., 2018; Musall et al., find rats and mice almost anywhere. Their flexibility makes them
2019; Stringer et al., 2019). excellent study subjects, and using these organisms comes with a
Recent advances in technology and analysis have removed wealth of chemical, molecular, genetic, and neural tools that can
many of the barriers that historically kept systems approaches decrease the time between behavioral observation and decipher-
largely limited to highly trained, head-restrained behavioral ing neural mechanisms. Many opportunities for investigation
tasks, and there is a growing interest in more natural behaviors. await: their natural behavioral repertoire is rich (Fig. 1), but
Many have called for neuroscientists to draw more inspiration underexplored (J. B. Calhoun, 1963; Crowcroft, 1966; Combs et
from ethology and behavioral ecology (Anderson and Perona, al., 2018; Phifer-Rixey and Nachman, 2015).
2014; Gomez-Marin et al., 2014; Krakauer et al., 2017; A. E. The ethological approach can also be limited by the questions
Brown and de Bivort, 2018; Juavinett et al., 2018; Mobbs et al., asked. Tinbergen himself acknowledged that “hunger, like, anger,
2018; Datta et al., 2019; Gomez-Marin, 2019; M. W. Mathis and fear, and so forth, is a phenomenon that can be known only by
Mathis, 2020; Parker et al., 2020). Here, we echo this sentiment introspection. When applied to another species, it is merely a
but also note that ethology and behavioral ecology can in turn be guess about the possible nature of the animal’s subjective state.”
improved by considering systems neuroscience. We will limit Systems neuroscience allows us to take Tinbergen’s “guess[es]
our remaining discussion by focusing on rodents, but we want to about . . . subjective state,” which systems neuroscientists would
acknowledge similar efforts for other mammals (Ghazanfar and
call internal states or computations, and turn them into testable
Hauser, 1999; Ulanovsky and Moss, 2007), birds (Nottebohm,
hypotheses. Through mathematical models of behavior, we can
2005; Carr and Peña, 2016), fish (Krahe and Fortune, 2013;
open new and exciting research areas for ethological examination.
Mearns et al., 2020), and invertebrates (Hamood and Marder,
2014; Haberkern et al., 2019; López-Cruz et al., 2019; Sakurai
Behavioral ecology needs systems neuroscience
and Katz, 2019).
Historically, behavioral ecology grew out of ethology, but it
focuses more on Tinbergen’s second two questions regarding
Ethology needs systems neuroscience the adaptive value and evolutionary history of a trait (J. M.
Ethology is the study of natural behaviors. In a foundational McNamara and Houston, 2009). In practice, behavioral ecolo-
manuscript, Nikolaas Tinbergen laid out four questions central gists usually study the interaction between individuals and their
to the discipline: causation (how does it work?), survival value environment, and they often assume that animals will behave
(what is it for?), evolution (how did it evolve?), and ontogeny optimally or will adapt to maximize fitness in a given environ-
(how does it develop?) (Tinbergen, 1963). Neuroethology, the ment (Simmons, 2014). Foraging, parental care, predator-prey
study of the neural basis of natural behavior, has long asked simi- interactions, sexual selection, and social behaviors, such as coop-
lar questions. In one of the first neuroethology texts, Ewing lists eration, are common foci of behavioral ecology research.
the major research areas in neuroethology: signal detection; sig- Technically, behavioral ecology differs from ethology through its
nal localization; memory acquisition; storage and recall; motiva- heavy dependence on mathematical models. Both fields rely on
tion; coordination; and top-down control (Ewing, 1981). These natural observations and laboratory experiments, but the heavy
are all active areas of study in both ethology and systems neuro- use of mathematics, computer simulation, and statistics allows
science today, yet the fields tackle these problems in different behavioral ecologists to model behavior and its evolution
ways. (Davidson and Gordon, 2017; Goldshtein et al., 2020; Harpaz
Ethologists have traditionally focused on “champion organ- and Schneidman, 2020). This process is reminiscent of systems
isms” (Heiligenberg, 1991). These are animals that have superior neuroscience’s reliance on mathematical models and theory to
capabilities that are linked to highly specialized neuronal struc- drive experiments, which in turn drive more models and theo-
ture, and animals will readily perform these behaviors in the lab- ries. These two fields also draw heavily from Marr (1983), and
oratory (Heiligenberg, 1991). the search for algorithmic-level understanding inspires many
For example, mosquitoes are champion human smellers within each of these disparate fields.
(DeGennaro et al., 2013), and owls are champion auditory hunt- Behavioral ecology has given us insights into speciation, sex-
ers (Konishi, 2003). This approach likely comes partially from ual selection, and mate choice (Lande, 1981); foraging (Charnov,
history, as ethology grew out of zoology as a discipline, and from 1976) and diet (Schoener, 1971); and cooperation (Reeve et al.,
suitability. For each champion organism, the adaptive value of 1998). However, behavioral ecologists generally do not examine
their champion behavior is clear: mosquitoes must find a blood the cognitive machinery that processes information, leaving
source to reproduce, owls must hunt in the dark to survive. Also, open the question of how neural systems constrain decision-
as champions, they produce these behaviors readily and often, making under ecological conditions. Circuit-level insights could
even in artificial laboratory conditions, allowing ethologists to further constrain models of optimality, and place realistic
tackle Tinbergen’s other three questions in the laboratory. This natural bounds on how animals can maximize fitness,
has yielded great insights into the mechanisms of sensory improving predictions and linking ecological models back to
Dennis et al. · Systems Neuroscience of Natural Behaviors in Rodents J. Neurosci., February 3, 2021 • 41(5):911–919 • 913

B C D

E F G

Figure 1. A day in the life of a few wild rodents. A, A diagrammed scene with dotted line “tracks” indicating the paths 2 mice could take throughout an imaginary day. Letters indicate con-
nection to subsequent panels below. B, Animal movements can be broken up into syllables (blue, pink in inset), and the Datta group identified context-dependent neural correlates for subsec-
ond behavioral structure in the dorsolateral striatum. C, At any moment, the local visible world is limited; and cues, like landmarks, can be ambiguous. Voigts identifies “uncertain” path
representations in the mouse retrosplenial cortex. D, El Hady models the difficult choices animals must make when foraging, as they decide when to stay in an area with dwindling resources,
and when to leave for other opportunities. E, Michaiel uses head-mounted cameras to track eye movements during prey capture and uncover principles of visual processing. F, Clemens identi-
fies an organizing principle of the lateral septum by recording and watching rats interact with mom, siblings, and age-matched strangers. G, Tervo identifies neural correlates of postural
changes in behavior when animals interact with dominant or submissive rats during foraging.

Tinbergen’s questions of causation and ontogeny, thus rather than the jargon of their subfield, highlight the similarities
strengthening the bonds between ethology and ecology as in goals and use tools that cross easily between disciplines.
well as systems neuroscience. Thanks to recent advances in machine learning, hardware
miniaturization, and computation, there are new opportunities
to combine systems and ethological approaches, to study and
New opportunities
model complex behaviors in more natural conditions while re-
Why have these fields remained separate, although they ask simi-
cording movement, performing temporally specific perturba-
lar questions and came into prominence around the same time?
tions, and recording from large numbers of neurons during
First, we must acknowledge that they have not remained entirely
freely moving behaviors. In the remainder of this review, we
separate: Tinbergen himself discussed uniting physiology and
each provide an example from our own work, highlighting how
ethology (Tinbergen, 1963), and some of the greatest successes of
combining these approaches can furnish fresh insights into the
each of these fields were interdisciplinary. Mark Konishi was a
neurobiology of natural behaviors in rodents (Fig. 1A).
paragon of neuroethology, but his auditory processing work
leaned on systems-style modeling to isolate computations of
individual neuron types in barn owls. Conversely, the famous Identifying the grammar of behavior with machine learning
systems neuroscience discovery of grid cells could not have hap- and machine vision
pened without freely moving animals. These success stories The Datta laboratory studies how the brain uses naturalistic
required individuals who could speak to multiple audiences behavior to support cognition. But what is a meaningful
914 • J. Neurosci., February 3, 2021 • 41(5):911–919 Dennis et al. · Systems Neuroscience of Natural Behaviors in Rodents

behavioral output, and how do we find behaviors that are rele- given moment, mice only have access to incomplete local sensory
vant to the animal, even if they do not have human-convenient information, but to successfully find rewards, they must integrate
descriptors? To address this question, the Datta laboratory devel- information as they move through the environment. Mice can
oped a novel behavioral characterization technology called solve such navigation tasks, echoing similar waypoint use in the
Motion Sequencing (MoSeq) (Fox et al., 2011; Wiltschko et al., wild (Stopka and Macdonald, 2003), and pointing to the exis-
2015; Johnson et al., 2016; Datta, 2019; Datta et al., 2019). MoSeq tence of short-term memory processes that hold and update
combines three-dimensional machine vision and unsupervised hypotheses about the animal’s position (Kanitscheider and Fiete,
machine learning approaches to instantiate the central hypothe- 2017).
sis of ethology: that behavior is built from an identifiable This work is newly possible. Recent advances, such as minia-
sequence of stereotyped modules of action (Tinbergen, 1951; turized implants, motor behavior tracking, and gaze tracking,
Simmons and Young, 1999). Here, unsupervised means that bring a new level of control to freely moving animals while
there is no human-annotated training data or ground-truth used reducing the impact on their behavior. Conversely, virtual reality
to “teach” the algorithm what to find. Unsupervised learning is has opened up the behavioral space available for study with
particularly useful here because mice are not humans, and find- head-fixed methods, such as 2-photon imaging either through
ing regularities in the data that a human could not identify a pri- traditional (Dombeck et al., 2007; Dombeck and Reiser, 2012) or
ori is a particular strength of this technique. Using MoSeq, Datta freely head-rotating (Voigts and Harnett, 2020) microscopes.
and colleagues demonstrated that mouse behavior can indeed be Voigts developed this head-rotating 2-photon imaging method
segmented into a set of components, called “behavioral syllables.” specifically to allow for subcellular imaging of dendritic activity
Each behavioral syllable is a brief and well-defined motif of 3D as animals navigate through purpose-built environments.
behavior that the brain places into sequences via definable transi- After imaging retrosplenial cortex using this head-rotating 2-
tion statistics (or behavioral “grammar”) to flexibly create com- photon microscope and freely moving electrophysiology, Voigts
plex patterns of action, either alone in an open field or in social looked at events where animals had only seen a small part of the
groups (Fig. 1B). learned arena, leaving them uncertain of their position. This
To know how information from the outside world is encoded incomplete information state had a distinct neural representa-
in the brain and transformed into these behaviors, they com- tion, suggesting that decision-making during navigation is driven
bined MoSeq with in vivo imaging of neural circuits in behaving by an intermediate, probabilistic representation of position. This
animals using fiber photometry (Gunaydin et al., 2014). This may include information about food sources, mates, or preda-
approach identified context-dependent neural correlates for sub- tors. In his own laboratory, Voigts plans to further extend this
second behavioral structure, and identified the dorsolateral stria- work to include more complex environments and will consider
tum as a key node for implementing these behavioral sequences the longer time-scales at which environments are explored in
(Markowitz et al., 2018). Further, they have recently developed a natural settings. This approach could provide a window into the
closed-loop version of MoSeq to pulse optogenetic stimulation of complex decision-making processes that rodents carry out in the
dopamine during specific subsecond behavioral syllables, reveal- wild.
ing rules that constrain naturalistic learning. These ongoing
experiments demonstrate that MoSeq can serve as a quantitative Foraging as a window into decision-making
prism useful for characterizing relationships between neural cir- One important goal of navigation is to find food. In the wild, for-
cuit activity and spontaneous behavior. aging engages multiple cognitive computations in addition to
spatial decision-making: animals may plan their routes, learn of
New technology uncovers neural correlates of naturalistic food distributions across spatiotemporal scales, and perform sta-
navigation tistical inference of food availability (A. J. Calhoun and Hayden,
In Mark Hartnett’s laboratory, Jakob Voigts is similarly looking 2015; Mobbs et al., 2018). Behavioral ecology examines the mul-
to uncover how fine-grained behaviors, such as wall-following tiple ways by which decision-making occurs in the animal’s
(Barnett, 1963), and individual left or right turn decisions ecological niche and the evolutionary pressures that lead to deci-
(Dominiak et al., 2019) combine over longer timescales in goal- sions in natural environments, but generally does not examine
directed navigation behaviors, such as the search for rewards the cognitive machinery that processes information nor the neu-
(Jackson et al., 2020). When animals navigate their natural envi- ral systems that likely constrain decision-making under ecologi-
ronment, they are constantly faced with decisions about which cal conditions (Hills, 2006; G. J. Stephens et al., 2008). Systems
paths to take. These decisions are part of a multilevel behavior: neuroscience has made great progress in elucidating the neuro-
large-scale goals, such as finding food, mates, or avoiding preda- biological mechanisms of decision-making; but because this is
tion, set the context for local pathfinding decisions, which are typically studied by training animals to perform stereotyped
then executed by more fine-grained somatosensory and visually behaviors under laboratory conditions, this does not describe
guided locomotion behavior. Understanding these decisions is a how such decisions are performed in a natural environment, nor
major component in understanding the computations that occur the ecological and evolutionary forces that shaped these proc-
in natural behavior, yet much of what is known about rodent esses (Fig. 1D).
navigation in the laboratory context stems from experiments in Patch foraging (Charnov, 1976; J. McNamara, 1982; Kacelnik
which pathfinding decisions are simplified into mazes (Tolman, and Bernstein, 1988; Olsson, 2006) is a rich and flexible type of
1948; Olton et al., 1977; Crawley and Goodwin, 1980; Handley foraging where an animal may enter a patch of food, such as a
and Mithani, 1984) or largely featureless arenas with salient distal berry bush, harvest resources, and then leave to search for
landmarks (Hall, 1936; O’Keefe and Dostrovsky, 1971; Morris, another patch of food (D. W. Stephens, 2008). The animal’s
1981) (Fig. 1C). behavior can be quantified by how long it stays in the patch, how
Voigts takes a hybrid approach: he trains mice to navigate to long it takes to get to another patch, the amount of food it has
reward locations using a static pattern of landmarks that are only consumed, and the movement pattern between patches. The ani-
visible one at a time from close distances. This means that, at any mal’s reward rate can be computed by its food intake over time,
Dennis et al. · Systems Neuroscience of Natural Behaviors in Rodents J. Neurosci., February 3, 2021 • 41(5):911–919 • 915

and often one assumes the animal wants to maximize its reward during movement, it is not clear how this stabilization is inte-
rate. Typically, experimenters use this framework to predict how grated with the potential need to shift the gaze for behavioral
and when an animal leaves one patch for another. Patch foraging goals during self-motion. In addition, because eye movements
is a widely studied and long-standing problem in behavioral are minimized when the head is held in a fixed position by the
ecology (King, 1986; Marschall et al., 1989; Rodríguez-Gironés experimenter (Payne and Raymond, 2017; Meyer et al., 2020;
and Vásquez, 1997; Nonacs and Soriano, 1998; Rita and Ranta, Michaiel et al., 2020), understanding the mechanisms of gaze
1998; F. Green, 2006; Raine et al., 2006; Zhang and Hui, 2014), control and active visual search benefits from studies in freely
and has implications for studies of decision-making, behavioral moving behaviors.
economics, and systems neuroscience (Kolling et al., 2012; To this end, Michaiel and colleagues designed a system to
Hayden and Walton, 2014; Shenhav et al., 2014; Constantino synchronously record head and bilateral eye movements (similar
and Daw, 2015; Lottem et al., 2018; Mobbs et al., 2018; Hall- to Wallace et al., 2013; Meyer et al., 2018, 2020) during prey cap-
McMaster and Luyckx, 2019). ture. Prey capture is an ethologically relevant behavior that,
El Hady and colleagues have described a theoretical and con- importantly, requires the localization of a distinct object in visual
ceptual framework for studying naturalistic decision-making in space (Hoy et al., 2016). As previously shown, these studies
the context of patch foraging, combining methodologies from revealed that the majority of eye movements compensate for
systems neuroscience and insights from ecology (Davidson and head movements, thereby acting to stabilize the visual scene.
El Hady, 2019; Kilpatrick et al., 2020). This provides a quantita- During head turns, however, periods of stabilization are inter-
tive mathematical description, or formalism, for designing natu- spersed by noncompensatory saccades that abruptly shift gaze
ralistic laboratory experiments to study foraging as it unfolds position. Analysis of eye movements relative to prey position
over multiple spatial and temporal scales, going beyond trial- shows that the saccades do not preferentially select a specific
based structures. Moreover, by changing the complexity of the point in the visual scene. Rather, orienting movements are driven
foraging environment, the formalism can accurately predict the by the head, with the eyes following, to stabilize and recenter the
changes in decision strategies that the animal adopts. The model gaze. These findings help relate eye movements in rodents to
proposed by El Hady and Davidson can also be extended to other species, and provide a foundation for studying active vision
understand how an animal learns the structure of the foraging during ethological behaviors in the mouse. This work builds on
environment, and how the presence of other animals and of the deep knowledge of visual processing from systems neuro-
social information changes foraging behavior. This approach science, and applied cutting-edge systems technical approaches
enables studying natural behaviors, such as foraging, in the same to a natural behavior.
formal manner that trained behaviors are currently studied in
systems neuroscience. In the future, it will be exciting to see how An organizing principle of the septum uncovered by
this work can inform experiments in natural-like environments watching rats interact with mom and siblings
while recording from neurons in freely moving animals. This Although mice and rats may be efficient cricket-killers, people
work blends the ecological and systems neuroscience theoretical who work closely with them know they can also be incredibly
approaches, and uses the common language of modeling to sweet and can often be seen playing, tickling, and snuggling with
bridge the interrelated fields of foraging ecology and decision each other (Cox and Rissman, 2011; Ishiyama and Brecht, 2016;
neuroscience. Reinhold et al., 2019). In Michael Brecht’s group, Ann Clemens’
recent work lays a strong foundation for the study of kinship in
Studying prey capture reveals principles of visual processing neural systems research that she will further explore in her own
Rats and mice are generalist foragers: although they are well laboratory (Clemens et al., 2020) (Fig. 1F).
known for eating grain and pantry items, invertebrates make up Early work by Peter Hepper showed that rat pups recognize
a large part of their diet where available (Sage, 1981). Even labo- and prefer their siblings to nonsiblings at birth, but this changes
ratory-raised animals will, with just a few days of exposure, effi- to a nonsibling preference later in development (Hepper, 1983).
ciently stalk, capture, and eat live prey (Hoy et al., 2016). In Cris In humans, affiliative experience toward kin is correlated with
Niell’s laboratory, Angie Michaiel took advantage of this strong activity in the lateral septum (Moll et al., 2012), Building on these
drive to attack crickets, and used it to uncover new insights into insights, Clemens found that lesions of the lateral septum, but
a classic systems neuroscience problem: visual control (Fig. 1E). not lesion of the cortex, abolished preference behavior in both
Across animal species, eye movements are used to sample young (sibling-preferring) and older (sibling-avoidant) rat pups.
and acquire information about the external world. The pattern of To further probe how sibling preference behavior may be
eye movements varies based on the animal’s particular goal supported in the lateral septum, Clemens performed juxta-cellu-
(Yarbus, 1967). In foveate animals, such as humans and several lar and whole-cell patch-clamp recordings in the lateral septum
other primate species, eye movements serve to center the visual of young, sibling-preferring pups and older, nonsibling prefer-
scene over the retinal fovea, granting the viewer high-acuity ring pups while providing kin- and nonkin stimuli. The stimuli
vision for complex visual search functions, such as identifying consisted of ultrasonic vocalizations from sibling pups, nonsi-
and tracking behaviorally relevant visual stimuli. Importantly, bling pups, the pup’s mother, and nonmother adults, which were
however, a majority of vertebrate species lack a specialized fovea, played during the electrophysiological recording. Neurons of the
and it is unclear how eye movements in afoveate animals are lateral septum responded to odor stimuli and vocalizations with
coordinated to actively localize and track moving visual objects. changes in both action potential firing rates and subthreshold
Previous studies in afoveate animals, such as in freely moving membrane potentials. Finally, when the researchers mapped the
rodents, have shown that eye movements largely serve to com- locations of the recorded neurons in the lateral septum, they
pensate for head movements (Wallace et al., 2013; Payne and found a topographic organization in which sibling- and mother-
Raymond, 2017; Meyer et al., 2018, 2020), consistent with the responsive neurons were located ventrally and nonsibling and
vestibulo-ocular reflex present in nearly all species (Straka et al., nonmother odor-responsive neurons were located dorsally. The
2016). While such compensation can stabilize the visual scene authors named this organization based on kinship “nepotopy.”
916 • J. Neurosci., February 3, 2021 • 41(5):911–919 Dennis et al. · Systems Neuroscience of Natural Behaviors in Rodents

This work identifies a brain region necessary for kinship Couzin, 2020), closed-loop behaviorally driven experimentation
behavior and describes the topographic organization of this (Schweihoff et al., 2019; Forys et al., 2020; Nourizonoz et al.,
region. Like other topographies in the brain, including tonotopy 2020), electrophysiology and calcium imaging analysis software
and somatotopy, this work suggests that the brain may organize (Pachitariu et al., 2016a,b; Chung et al., 2017; Buccino et al.,
social relationships in an ordered fashion to support integration 2018; Chaure et al., 2018; Giovannucci et al., 2019; Cantu et al.,
of sensory cues and select appropriate behavioral outputs. 2020), open source hardware (Siegle et al., 2017; J. Brown
Complementary evidence comes from studies regarding social et al., 2018; Aharoni and Hoogland, 2019; Voigts et al., 2019),
interactions in prairie voles (Williams et al., 1992; Walum and and open data (Kranstauber et al., 2011; Oh et al., 2014;
Young, 2018; Beery 2019) where Ca21 imaging experiments Yatsenko et al., 2018; Zheng et al., 2018; Ruebel et al., 2019) are
identify neuronal ensembles with shared activity characteristics paving the way. These open resources will be crucial to allow
with pair-bonded partners versus unfamiliar vole approach researchers to link knowledge across disciplines, species, and
behavior (Scribner et al., 2020). These and other emerging stud- scales. For example, someone studying a natural behavior with a
ies show how the examination of a natural, ethologically relevant working memory component may be able to record neural activ-
behavior can uncover novel computations and neural organiza- ity in a brain region during their natural behavior and compare
tional principles. it with data from a highly trained behavior, leading to either a
synthesis across tasks or ideas for more experiments to uncover
Rat social dynamics yield insights into the neural basis of the source of differences between the results, for instance, by re-
switching behaviors cording more of the behavior during the two-alternative forced
Individual rats’ behaviors are constrained and promoted by their choice task, or by restricting some of the variables in the natural
social interactions with their conspecifics (Grant, 1963; scene where the adaptive value may be more obvious. One could
Blanchard et al., 1977). Exactly how the presence and actions of build on a model developed from a two-alternative forced choice
one or several animals in these social interactions induces or task and modify it to fit a more natural behavior, or use it to fit
restricts the behavior of another is a central unanswered question data across multiple species, improving the understanding of
in animal behavior (Porfiri, 2018). In Alla Karpova’s laboratory, how a computation may have evolved. These are just a few of the
Gowan Tervo has tracked the movement and classified the exciting possibilities ahead.
actions of multiple interacting rats of known social ranks. In In 1963, Tinbergen highlighted the need to identify the “fun-
these experiments, individual rats’ actions and locations in an damental identity of aims and methods” to unite fields and that
arena depend on the locations and actions of other rats. “co-operation between all these workers is within reach, and the
Furthermore, these dependencies, as well as the duration and fre- main obstacle seems to be the lack of appreciation of the fact that
quency of each rat’s set of postures, are correlated with the rats’ there is a common aim.” Today, we feel the same. Together, we
social ranks. These differences in pose frequency are dependent are a group of scientists with deep appreciation for the common
on the presence of conspecifics. In his own laboratory, Tervo is aims across many disciplines, especially systems neuroscience,
now using wireless recording and perturbation technologies to ecology, and ethology. We hope this review and the Mini-
probe the neural basis of this behavior, with special focus on the Symposium that will follow facilitate some of these interactions
role of the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex to switching in pos- and alliances and help us all do even better science, together.
tural dynamics (Fig. 1G).
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