What is behavior and how do we study it 🔍?#
The practical workshop for Day 1 will be an interactive exploration of the philosophies and theories that underlie the study of behavior.
We will start at 11:00 UTC on Zoom for timezones UTC to UTC+9.
We will re-run this practical starting at 17:00 UTC on Zoom for timezones UTC-9 to UTC-3.
Introduction (~ 30 min)#
Why do we care about behavior? And how do we identify behaviors?
We will begin with a bit of neuroscience history to understand the neuroscientific motivations for studying behavior. We will then discuss how our field defines behavior, including our own definitions of behavior.
Warming up our observation skills: training games from the world of theater (~30 min)#
Local Hubs: play the training games with your in-person groups.
Online students/TAs: go into breakout rooms and play training games over zoom.
Recap and discussion#
After playing our observation training games, how would you now answer the question “What is behavior?”
Field Neuroscience: A framework for non-invasively studying behavior in natural settings (~20 min)#
Course instructor Danbee Kim will introduce Field Neuroscience, a framework for studying behavior developed during their PhD.
Learning how to look (~30 min)#
TAs: please use this presentation to play “Learning how to look” with your students.
Local Hubs: play “Learning how to look” with your in-person groups.
Online students/TAs: go into breakout rooms and play “Learning how to look” over zoom.
Other modern frameworks for studying behavior (~30 min)#
We will discuss other modern frameworks for studying behavior and discuss how these frameworks impact the way we design, conduct, and analyse behavioral neuroscience experiments.
Wrap-up: Observation Stone Soup! (~15 min)#
Like the story of stone soup, we are going to throw in observations we made during today’s session! Make sure to highlight a positive observation about your buddy for the day, but feel free to throw in any observations you made, about yourself, about others, about the content, about the course so far, etc.