Neuroethology of Acoustic Prey Localization in the Barn Owl

Abstract

During the 1971 International Ethological Conference in Edinburgh there was a symposium in which Ken Roeder and Niko Tinbergen spoke. Ken said that he studied behavior under the skin, while Niko outside the skin. Indeed, this was the only difference between them, for their ideas and goals of studying natural behavior were very similar. In our study of the barn owl we moved freely across the interface between behavior and neurophysiology. The most important philosophical and practical problem was to design both behavioral experiments which would reveal the attributes of the underlying neural mechanisms and physiological experiments which were relevant to the behavior under study. On several occasions our physiological observations led us to fruitful behavioral experiments and these, in turn, helped generate new ideas for useful physiological investigations.

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