Jasna Hodžić at Big Think:
Neuroscientists have been studying more cognition-based questions — like how the brain recognizes patterns, remembers information, or learns rules to get a reward — for some time now. “Studying tasks that tapped into real cognition opened up whole sets of neural properties you simply don’t see in basic sensory tasks,” says Miller. But the experimental setup rarely changed, and the strengths of classical neuroscience — precision and control — limited the reach of these studies.
Ethology and related fields such as behavioral ecology have the opposite strengths and weaknesses. Primatologists can observe and track natural behavior in extraordinary detail and develop ecological theories about how certain behaviors impact survival. While classical neuroscience might reveal how the brain creates behavior, ethology reveals why a behavior might matter.
One case offers a clear example of the kinds of questions that neither primate ethology nor neuroscience can answer on its own.
More here.
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