ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
The evolution of self-control.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 280 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
280 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- On the (limited) use of touchscreen-based behavioural and cognitive research with dogs: potential causes and future directions.Animal cognition · 2026Pooled it
- Socioecological complexity in primate groups and its cognitive correlates.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Pooled it
- Article
- Filling, color, and shape: individuality in chimpanzee drawings.Primates; journal of primatology · 2026Article
- Brain structure and function in Homo naledi.Brain structure & function · 2026Review
- Performance of sheep and goats in a delay of gratification task.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- To Merge or not: The Early Onto- and Phylogenetic Origin of Co-Representation.Developmental science · 2026Article
- The case for contextually grounded executive function measurement.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Individual differences in inhibitory control may influence how endangered eels deal with river barriers during migration.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Evaluating inhibitory control in captive raccoons (Procyon lotor) using the cylinder task.Learning & behavior · 2026Article
- Generalist vs. specialist: cognition and behavioral flexibility in Gambusia across habitats.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Cognitive performance of dusky damselfish in a detour task with increasing difficulty.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Article
- Linking social attention to reproductive state and future reproduction in female monkeys.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2026Article
- Smart Ungulates: What Sheep and Goats' Performances in a Reversed-Reward Contingency Task Tell Us About the Evolution of Cognitive Flexibility.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Article
- ManyFishes: a big team science collaboration on fish comparative cognition.Animal cognition · 2025Review
- Inhibitory control tests in non-human animals: validity, reliability, and perspectives.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- The Social Relevance of Numbers: Insights from Animal Studies.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Temperament and cognitive flexibility across lemur species.Animal behaviour · 2025Article
220 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
58 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Cognition presents evolutionary research with one of its greatest challenges. Cognitive evolution has been explained at the proximate level by shifts in absolute and relative brain volume and at the ultimate level by differences in social and dietary complexity. However, no study has integrated the experimental and phylogenetic approach at the scale required to rigorously test these explanations. Instead, previous research has largely relied on various measures of brain size as proxies for cognitive abilities. We experimentally evaluated these major evolutionary explanations by quantitatively comparing the cognitive performance of 567 individuals representing 36 species on two problem-solving tasks measuring self-control. Phylogenetic analysis revealed that absolute brain volume best predicted performance across species and accounted for considerably more variance than brain volume controlling for body mass. This result corroborates recent advances in evolutionary neurobiology and illustrates the cognitive consequences of cortical reorganization through increases in brain volume. Within primates, dietary breadth but not social group size was a strong predictor of species differences in self-control. Our results implicate robust evolutionary relationships between dietary breadth, absolute brain volume, and self-control. These findings provide a significant first step toward quantifying the primate cognitive phenome and explaining the process of cognitive evolution.
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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.