Lunchtime Talk - Aliya Dewey 11/01/2024

Title: Design explanation in behavioural neuroscience
Abstract: Explanation in behavioural neuroscience is often thought to be mechanistic-to explain stimulus-response pairs by describing a mechanism (working parts “causally between” stimuli and responses). I suggest that behavioural neuroscientists in fact want a richer form of explanation-one that explains task-performance pairs by describing some kind of correspondence between the mechanism and the structure required to perform the task. In other words, they want an explanation for how a mechanism realises competent task performance as such. Using a detailed case study of sound localisation in the barn owl (Tyto alba), I argue that this form of explanation-which I call “design explanation”-integrates mechanistic, minimal model, and constraint-based forms of explanation.