ArticleInterface focus2017
Is behavioural flexibility evidence of cognitive complexity? How evolution can inform comparative cognition.
Article in Interface focus, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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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
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- 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
- Embodied cognitive evolution and the limits of convergence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Article
- Everything and nothing is conscious: default assumptions in science and ethics.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Review
- Fundamental constraints to the logic of living systems.Interface focus · 2024Review
- Differences in inhibitory control in two species of Tanganyikan bower-building cichlids contrasting in building flexibility.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Large-scale coupling of prefrontal activity patterns as a mechanism for cognitive control in health and disease: evidence from rodent models.Frontiers in neural circuits · 2024Review
- The role of climate change and niche shifts in divergent range dynamics of a sister-species pair.Peer community journal · 2023Article
- Article
- Evolution of Brains and Computers: The Roads Not Taken.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Spider webs inspiring soft robotics.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2020Article
- Social competition stimulates cognitive performance in a sex-specific manner.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Neural architecture of the vertebrate brain: implications for the interaction between emotion and cognition.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2019Review
- Comparative psychometrics: establishing what differs is central to understanding what evolves.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Behavioural flexibility is often treated as the gold standard of evidence for more sophisticated or complex forms of animal cognition, such as planning, metacognition and mindreading. However, the evidential link between behavioural flexibility and complex cognition has not been explicitly or systematically defended. Such a defence is particularly pressing because observed flexible behaviours can frequently be explained by putatively simpler cognitive mechanisms. This leaves complex cognition hypotheses open to 'deflationary' challenges that are accorded greater evidential weight precisely because they offer putatively simpler explanations of equal explanatory power. This paper challenges the blanket preference for simpler explanations, and shows that once this preference is dispensed with, and the full spectrum of evidence-including evolutionary, ecological and phylogenetic data-is accorded its proper weight, an argument in support of the prevailing assumption that behavioural flexibility can serve as evidence for complex cognitive mechanisms may begin to take shape. An adaptive model of cognitive-behavioural evolution is proposed, according to which the existence of convergent trait-environment clusters in phylogenetically disparate lineages may serve as evidence for the same trait-environment clusters in other lineages. This, in turn, could permit inferences of cognitive complexity in cases of experimental underdetermination, thereby placing the common view that behavioural flexibility can serve as evidence for complex cognition on firmer grounds.
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