W7 - Neuroscience Needs Behaviour Flashcards
Why do Krakauer et al. believe that behavioural work is necessary in neuropsychiatric research?
behavioural work provides understanding of the specific processes that are instantiated in the brain and, only then, can neural interventions establish causality of specific neural mechanisms
What is degeneracy?
the same function can be supported by multiple networks
Neuroscientists usually look at the software or the hardware of the brain?
Hardware
Why is it important to design ecologically valid behavioural tasks?
to discover neural circuits that are relevant to naturalistic behaviour
What is the limitation of studying animal behaviour outside of its ecological niche?
the behaviour may be entirely distinct from the animal’s natural behavioural repertoire and elicit neural responses that would never normally be used
What is the granularity mismatch in behavioural neuroscience?
Detailed understanding of neural activity but coarse understanding of behaviour.
Who said ‘trying to understand perception by understanding neurons is like trying to understand a bird’s flight by studying only feathers’?
Marr
What are Marr’s three levels of analysis?
Computation (why)
Algorithm (what)
Implementation (how)
What is an example of inferring psychological processes from neural data in a reductionist way?
Observing that mirror neurons fire when a monkey performs an action or sees one, this phenomenon has been interpreted as evidence that the monkey understands the intention of the animal it is observing
Which level of Marr’s analysis is overrepresented in neuroscience?
Implementation
What is an example of behavioural research that shed light on neural activity?
Bradykinesia- the lack of movement vigor characteristic of Parkinson’s disease: insight from a purely behavioural experiment led to experiments in mice to identify cells in the dorsal striatum activity correlates with movement vigour and manipulation controls vigour.
