Decoding the neural basis of behaviour requires analysing how the nervous system is organised and how the temporal structure of motor patterns emerges from its activity. The stereotypical patterns of the calling song behaviour of male crickets, which consists of chirps and pulses, is an ideal model to study this question. We applied selective lesions to the abdominal nervous system of field cri...

Why was Ivan Pavlevich Pavlov so widely celebrated in the decades after 1900? As his story of the ‘freedom reflex’ illustrates, Pavlov often overstated his observations. By calling all innate behaviour a reflex and all learned behaviour a conditional reflex, he meant to eliminate consciousness and volition from science. Pavlov’s universal reflex explanation became the prototype for

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2014.12.023 0003-3472/© 2015 The Association for the Study of A Loss of sexual signals should be strongly selected against when these signals are necessary for mate attraction or acquisition. Male Teleogryllus oceanicus field crickets produce a long-distance calling song to attract females. Separate genetic mutations recently evolved on the Hawaiian Islands o...

Body size–age relationships may have important implications for the evolution and maintenance of alternative mating tactics, but these relationships remain largely unexplored in anuran amphibians (frogs and toads). In a single territorial anuran species, smaller noncalling ‘satellite’ males are younger than calling males. These results have led to the general assumption that such an age differe...

The scope and meaning of ‘accountability’ has been extended in a number of directions well beyond its core sense of being called to account for one’s actions. It has been applied to internal aspects of official behaviour, beyond the external focus implied by being called to account; to institutions that control official behaviour other than through calling officials to account; to means of maki...