Animals respond adaptively to their environments, altering their behaviors appropriately as circumstances warrant. One of the forefront areas in Neuroscience is understanding how behaviors, and the neural circuits underlying them, change with experience or under different conditions. Importantly, different species, even closely related species, show varying capacities and strategies for leaning and memory, find different stimuli salient for directing behavior and encode and organize information differently. In this Gordon Research Conference on Neuroethology: neural and behavioral plasticity (Aug. 18-23, Oxford University, England) we will focus on questions such as: Are the cellular and molecular mechanisms of plasticity conserved among vertebrates and invertebrates? If so, can universal cellular mechanisms explain the diversity of species-specific patterns of behavioral plasticity? We wish to bring together neurobiologists using a range of tools from the behavioral to the molecular, and studying a variety of organisms to address these questions. Participants will include scientists studying fruitful neuroethological paradigms with a plasticity component, such as song-learning in song birds, binaural localization in owls, olfactory discrimination and spatial localization in bees. Parental behavior in voles and other rodents, synaptic and behavioral plasticity in sea-slugs and octopus, along with scientists utilizing molecular/genetic approaches in species such as fruit flies, nematode worms, and mice. Our goal is for broad intellectual and technical cross-fertilization between these two traditions.
