Studying the evolutionary ecology of cognition in the wild: a review of practical and conceptual challenges

Abstract

Cognition is defined as the processes by which animals collect, retain and use information from their environment to guide their behaviour. Thus cognition is essential in a wide range of behaviours, including foraging, avoiding predators and mating. Despite this pivotal role, the evolutionary processes shaping variation in cognitive performance among individuals in wild populations remain very poorly understood. Selection experiments in captivity suggest that cognitive traits can have substantial heritability and can undergo rapid evolution. However only a handful of studies have attempted to explore how cognition influences life-history variation and fitness in the wild, and direct evidence for the action of natural or sexual selection on cognition is still lacking, reasons for which are diverse. Here we review the current literature with a view to: (i) highlighting the key practical and conceptual challenges faced by the field; (ii) describing how to define and measure cognitive traits in natural populations, and suggesting which species, populations and cognitive traits might be examined to greatest effect; emphasis is placed on selecting traits that are linked to functional behaviour; (iii) discussing how to deal with confounding factors such as personality and motivation in field as well as captive studies; (iv) describing how to measure and interpret relationships between cognitive performance, functional behaviour and fitness, offering some suggestions as to when and what kind of selection might be predicted; and (v) showing how an evolutionary ecological framework, more generally, along with innovative technologies has the potential to revolutionise the study of cognition in the wild. We conclude that the evolutionary ecology of cognition in wild populations is a rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field providing many opportunities for advancing the understanding of how cognitive abilities have evolved.

Environmental and genetic determinants of innovativeness in a natural population of birds

“…We hope our paper stimulates other researchers to take a similar approach in their study systems, perhaps incorporating a range of different innovation tasks. Finally, it is worth noting that detailed study of the different mechanisms underlying innovativeness-personality and cognitive, for examplemay ultimately be needed to determine the causes and population-level consequences of variation in the tendency to innovate among individuals [22,40].…”

“…While associative learning seems to be a likely cognitive process contributing to individual variation in innovative problem-solving success [14 -18], identifying all of the cognitive components underlying innovation and its proxies remains a major challenge [17,19 -21]. At the same time, considerable debate surrounds whether and how individual differences in various cognitive abilities might ever be measured in evolutionary ecological studies, given the enormous difficulty associated with controlling for factors such as motivation, and given that some genes have pleiotropic effects on cognitive and purportedly non-cognitive traits [22][23][24][25]. A major challenge is to understand the adaptive significance of innovativeness and indeed of its underlying components [7].…”

Fast- and slow-exploring pigeons differ in how they use previously learned rules

“…Sex of subject was either both or not reported, unless otherwise stated. *It is not clear which cognitive ability underpins problem solving (Griffin and Guez, 2014;Morand-Ferron et al, 2015;Rowe and Healy, 2014) if any (van Horik and Madden, 2016). For the cognitive task it is indicated whether the 'A' acquisition or 'U' use of previously acquired information was measured.…”

Influencing Factors on the Ecological Protection Behaviors of Entrepreneurial Farmers in Chinese Forest Zones

“…Although entrepreneurial farmers are generally concerned about ecological protection, there is a significant gap between their cognition and behavior [5]. Some farmers undertake ecological programs after social and ecological rationales have been explained [6].…”