Our Mechanisms of Behavior (MoB) area focuses on understanding neural, evolutionary, and ontogenetic mechanisms of behavior. Faculty interests extend to both proximate and ultimate mechanisms of a broad variety of behaviors, including sexual behaviors, sex differences, mate choice, and reproduction; communication; parent-offspring interactions; feeding and foraging; and animal models of neural disease and psychopathology.

An important point of convergence for the area is in understanding how behavior serves biological functions (or dysfunctions) in individual and social life, how behavior develops within the context of biological systems, and how the nervous system and body sense and express themselves.

Evolution, the unifying framework of the life sciences, is central to our domain, and we incorporate comparative approaches and adaptive-evolutionary analyses. Neurobiology is at the core of behavior and one of the grand challenges is to discover ways of integrating across levels: from neurons and the genes and molecules within them, to the functional systems that they form, to the behavior they express, and to the interactions of behaving bodies that they mediate.

Our MoB area is focused on informed and applied applications to behavior, incorporating systems-level, cellular and molecular approaches into the organism, to understand their roles in behavior and the roles of behavior in shaping neurobiological expression.

Behavior, behavioral change, and the measurement thereof is central to the goals of the Psychological and Brain Sciences, as well as more broadly to the goals of the health and life sciences. The MoB area connects with many of the most venerable topics of the psychological sciences—sensation and perception, motivation, social behavior, and learning. In all of these endeavors, we champion behavior as both cause and consequence.