Meeting Abstract
Bridging the conceptual gap between neural circuitry and behavior remains a significant challenge in neurobiology education. The perceived complexity of behavior keeps many students from attempting to break actions into constituent parts, and without the context of these behavioral building blocks understanding their controlling circuitry becomes infeasible. To address this challenge, I designed a series of laboratory exercises using autonomous robots built with the Arduino platform and drawing from Braitenberg’s Vehicles as a major source of inspiration. These experiments allowed students to interact with and manipulate the neural circuits and behaviors they studied in order to demonstrate the relationship between the two and the emergent nature of behavior. The first exercise challenged students to explain the stereotyped behavior of freely-moving robots using simple rules in the form of “if-then” statements connecting environmental stimuli to behavior rather than assigning the organism motivation. After this, I led students to translate these rules into neural circuitry and showed how these simple rules or circuits could be translated into computer code. Finally, students designed and programmed their own robots with biologically-inspired behaviors such as environmental navigation, communication, and predator-prey interaction. Through this process, students were challenged to think more analytically about animal behavior and its connection to neural circuitry as well as the emergent nature of behavior and the limitations imposed on it by sensors and actuators. The basic level of electronics design and programming competency these exercises gave students and the effectiveness of the robots as an educational tool made them a welcome addition to our neurobiology laboratory curriculum.
