Behavioral neuroscience

Behavioral neuroscience, also known as biological psychology,^[1] biopsychology, or psychobiology,^[2] is the application of the principles of biology to the study of physiological, genetic, and developmental mechanisms of behavior in humans and other animals.^[3]

"Biological psychology" redirects here. For the journals, see Behavioral Neuroscience (journal); Biological Psychology (journal); and Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience.

Relationship to other fields of psychology and biology[edit]

In many cases, humans may serve as experimental subjects in behavioral neuroscience experiments; however, a great deal of the experimental literature in behavioral neuroscience comes from the study of non-human species, most frequently rats, mice, and monkeys. As a result, a critical assumption in behavioral neuroscience is that organisms share biological and behavioral similarities, enough to permit extrapolations across species. This allies behavioral neuroscience closely with comparative psychology, ethology, evolutionary biology, and neurobiology. Behavioral neuroscience also has paradigmatic and methodological similarities to neuropsychology, which relies heavily on the study of the behavior of humans with nervous system dysfunction (i.e., a non-experimentally based biological manipulation). Synonyms for behavioral neuroscience include biopsychology, biological psychology, and psychobiology.^[8] Physiological psychology is a subfield of behavioral neuroscience, with an appropriately narrower definition.

Lesions

– A new technique usually used with human subjects in which a magnetic coil applied to the scalp causes unsystematic electrical activity in nearby cortical neurons which can be experimentally analyzed as a functional lesion.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation

– A receptor activated solely by a synthetic ligand (RASSL) or Designer Receptor Exclusively Activated by Designer Drugs (DREADD), permits spatial and temporal control of G protein signaling in vivo. These systems utilize G protein-coupled receptors (GPCR) engineered to respond exclusively to synthetic small molecules ligands, like clozapine N-oxide (CNO), and not to their natural ligand(s). RASSL's represent a GPCR-based chemogenetic tool. These synthetic ligands upon activation can decrease neural function by G-protein activation. This can with Potassium attenuating neural activity.^[9]

Synthetic ligand injection

inhibition – A light activated inhibitory protein is expressed in cells of interest. Powerful millisecond timescale neuronal inhibition is instigated upon stimulation by the appropriate frequency of light delivered via fiber optics or implanted LEDs in the case of vertebrates,^[10] or via external illumination for small, sufficiently translucent invertebrates.^[11] Bacterial Halorhodopsins or Proton pumps are the two classes of proteins used for inhibitory optogenetics, achieving inhibition by increasing cytoplasmic levels of halides (Cl⁻
) or decreasing the cytoplasmic concentration of protons, respectively.^[12]^[13]

Optogenetic

Sensation and perception

(hunger, thirst, sex)

Motivated behavior

Control of movement

and memory

Learning

and biological rhythms

Sleep

Emotion

In general, behavioral neuroscientists study similar themes and issues as academic psychologists, though limited by the need to use nonhuman animals. As a result, the bulk of literature in behavioral neuroscience deals with mental processes and behaviors that are shared across different animal models such as:

However, with increasing technical sophistication and with the development of more precise noninvasive methods that can be applied to human subjects, behavioral neuroscientists are beginning to contribute to other classical topic areas of psychology, philosophy, and linguistics, such as:

Behavioral neuroscience has also had a strong history of contributing to the understanding of medical disorders, including those that fall under the purview of clinical psychology and biological psychopathology (also known as abnormal psychology). Although animal models do not exist for all mental illnesses, the field has contributed important therapeutic data on a variety of conditions, including:

(1942)

Ann Graybiel

(1961)

Cornelia Bargmann

(1957)

Winfried Denk

Nobel Laureates

The following Nobel Prize winners could reasonably be considered behavioral neuroscientists or neurobiologists. (This list omits winners who were almost exclusively neuroanatomists or neurophysiologists; i.e., those that did not measure behavioral or neurobiological variables.)

Kavli Prize in Neuroscience