Natural behavior is what you do, not just where you are

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 27 February 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02225-z

As neuroscience increasingly recognizes that understanding the brain requires studying natural behavior, it has begun to adopt more naturalistic experimental environments as a means to that end — an important and welcome shift. Yet environmental realism alone does not guarantee that natural behavior is being studied and, in some cases, can create the illusion of ecological relevance or even promote unnatural behavior if the behavioral context is poorly aligned with a species’ ecology. Keeping sight of our central goal — understanding how brains support the actions animals evolved to perform — requires an ethological focus not only on where experiments occur, but on what animals are actually doing and whether the environment affords those behaviors.