ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2012
What is comparable in comparative cognition?
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 34 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
34 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Individual variation in cognitive performance: developmental and evolutionary perspectives.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2012Pooled it
- The exploration of consciousness in insects.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Embodied cognitive evolution and the limits of convergence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Selection shapes diverse animal minds.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- On the prospects of basal cognition research becoming fully evolutionary: promising avenues and cautionary notes.History and philosophy of the life sciences · 2025Article
- Adapting to Uncertainty: Foraging Strategies inInsects · 2024Article
- Article
- Judgement bias may be explained by shifts in stimulus response curves.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Quantitative abilities of invertebrates: a methodological review.Animal cognition · 2022Review
- Jumping spiders: An exceptional group for comparative cognition studies.Learning & behavior · 2021Review
- Non-numerical strategies used by bees to solve numerical cognition tasks.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Current Understanding of the "Insight" Phenomenon Across Disciplines.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
- Genome-Wide Association Studies Reveal Neurological Genes for Dog Herding, Predation, Temperament, and Trainability Traits.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2021Article
- Breed Differences in Dog Cognition Associated with Brain-Expressed Genes and Neurological Functions.Integrative and comparative biology · 2020Article
- Ants resort to heuristics when facing relational-learning tasks they cannot solve.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Replications in Comparative Cognition: What Should We Expect and How Can We Improve?Animal behavior and cognition · 2020Article
- Bumblebees Learn a Relational Rule but Switch to a Win-Stay/Lose-Switch Heuristic After Extensive Training.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2020Article
- Interactive rhythms across species: the evolutionary biology of animal chorusing and turn-taking.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2019Article
- Insect-Inspired Sequential Inspection Strategy Enables an Artificial Network of Four Neurons to Estimate Numerosity.iScience · 2019Article
- High-Speed Videography Reveals How Honeybees Can Turn a Spatial Concept Learning Task Into a Simple Discrimination Task by Stereotyped Flight Movements and Sequential Inspection of Pattern Elements.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
To understand how complex, or 'advanced' various forms of cognition are, and to compare them between species for evolutionary studies, we need to understand the diversity of neural-computational mechanisms that may be involved, and to identify the genetic changes that are necessary to mediate changes in cognitive functions. The same overt cognitive capacity might be mediated by entirely different neural circuitries in different species, with a many-to-one mapping between behavioural routines, computations and their neural implementations. Comparative behavioural research needs to be complemented with a bottom-up approach in which neurobiological and molecular-genetic analyses allow pinpointing of underlying neural and genetic bases that constrain cognitive variation. Often, only very minor differences in circuitry might be needed to generate major shifts in cognitive functions and the possibility that cognitive traits arise by convergence or parallel evolution needs to be taken seriously. Hereditary variation in cognitive traits between individuals of a species might be extensive, and selection experiments on cognitive traits might be a useful avenue to explore how rapidly changes in cognitive abilities occur in the face of pertinent selection pressures.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.