Parenting is essential for survival and wellbeing in many species. Since it can be performed with little prior experience and entails considerable sacrifices without immediate benefits for the caregiver, this behavior is likely orchestrated by evolutionarily shaped, hard-wired neural circuits. At the same time, experience, environmental factors and internal state also make parenting highly malleable. These characteristics have made parenting an attractive paradigm for linking complex, naturalistic behavior to its underlying neural mechanisms. Recent work - based on the identification of critical neuronal populations and improved tools for dissecting neural circuits - has uncovered novel functional principles and challenged simplistic models of parenting control. A better understanding of the neural basis of parenting will provide crucial clues to how complex behaviors are organized at the level of cells, circuits and computations. Here I review recent progress, discuss emerging functional principles of parental circuits, and outline future opportunities and challenges.

中文翻译：

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养育——研究行为的神经回路基础的范例。


养育子女对于许多物种的生存和福祉至关重要。由于它可以在几乎没有经验的情况下进行，并且需要付出相当大的牺牲，而不会立即给护理人员带来好处，因此这种行为很可能是由进化形成的硬连线神经回路精心策划的。同时，经验、环境因素和内在状态也使得养育方式具有很强的可塑性。这些特征使养育方式成为将复杂、自然的行为与其潜在的神经机制联系起来的有吸引力的范例。最近的工作——基于关键神经元群的识别和解剖神经回路的改进工具——发现了新的功能原理，并对养育控制的简单化模型提出了挑战。更好地理解养育的神经基础将为了解如何在细胞、电路和计算层面组织复杂的行为提供重要线索。在这里，我回顾了最近的进展，讨论了父母回路的新兴功能原理，并概述了未来的机遇和挑战。