ReviewFrontiers in psychology2016
How Can We Study the Evolution of Animal Minds?
Review in Frontiers in psychology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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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.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The repeatability of cognitive performance: a meta-analysis.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Pooled it
- Simple life, simple minds? How habitat simplification in aquatic ecosystems shape fish cognition.Animal cognition · 2026Review
- Beyond criterion: cognitive flexibility in wild striated caracaras.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Tit wit: environmental and genetic drivers of cognitive variation along an urbanization gradient.Animal cognition · 2025Article
- Linking individual fitness to the evolution of cognition.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Environmental harshness does not affect the propensity for social learning in great tits, Parus major.Animal cognition · 2024Article
- The role of cognition in nesting.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Cognitive performance is linked to fitness in a wild primate.Science advances · 2023Article
- Individual consistency in the learning abilities of honey bees: cognitive specialization within sensory and reinforcement modalities.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Stressfulness of the design influences consistency of cognitive measures and their correlation with animal personality traits in wild mice (Mus musculus).Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Cognitive performance is linked to survival in free-living African striped mice.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Horses' Tactile Reactivity Differs According to the Type of Work: The Example of Equine-Assisted Intervention.Veterinary sciences · 2023Article
- Modelling how cleaner fish approach an ephemeral reward task demonstrates a role for ecologically tuned chunking in the evolution of advanced cognition.PLoS biology · 2022Article
- Nesting ecology does not explain slow-fast cognitive differences among honeybee species.Animal cognition · 2021Article
- Understanding fish cognition: a review and appraisal of current practices.Animal cognition · 2021Review
- Individual variation in cognitive style reflects foraging and anti-predator strategies in a small mammal.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Linking cognition with fitness in a wild primate: fitness correlates of problem-solving performance and spatial learning ability.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Heritabilities and co-variation among cognitive traits in red junglefowl.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Cognition in the field: comparison of reversal learning performance in captive and wild passerines.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Looming sounds are perceived as faster than receding sounds.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
During the last 50 years, comparative cognition and neurosciences have improved our understanding of animal minds while evolutionary ecology has revealed how selection acts on traits through evolutionary time. We describe how cognition can be subject to natural selection like any other biological trait and how this evolutionary approach can be used to understand the evolution of animal cognition. We recount how comparative and fitness methods have been used to understand the evolution of cognition and outline how these approaches could extend our understanding of cognition. The fitness approach, in particular, offers unprecedented opportunities to study the evolutionary mechanisms responsible for variation in cognition within species and could allow us to investigate both proximate (i.e., neural and developmental) and ultimate (i.e., ecological and evolutionary) underpinnings of animal cognition together. We highlight recent studies that have successfully shown that cognitive traits can be under selection, in particular by linking individual variation in cognition to fitness. To bridge the gap between cognitive variation and fitness consequences and to better understand why and how selection can occur on cognition, we end this review by proposing a more integrative approach to study contemporary selection on cognitive traits combining socio-ecological data, minimally invasive neuroscience methods and measurement of ecologically relevant behaviors linked to fitness. Our overall goal in this review is to build a bridge between cognitive neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists, illustrate how their research could be complementary, and encourage evolutionary ecologists to include explicit attention to cognitive processes in their studies of behavior.
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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.