ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2017
Re-evaluating the link between brain size and behavioural ecology in primates.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 51 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
51 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Socioecological complexity in primate groups and its cognitive correlates.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Pooled it
- Origins of violence: evolutionary decoupling between mild and lethal conspecific aggression in primates.Evolution letters · 2026Article
- Simple life, simple minds? How habitat simplification in aquatic ecosystems shape fish cognition.Animal cognition · 2026Review
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- Linking social attention to reproductive state and future reproduction in female monkeys.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2026Article
- 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
- Human dexterity and brains evolved hand in hand.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Proximate mechanisms underlying the coevolution of diet quality and relative brain size in primates.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Evidence of self-care tooling and phylogenetic modeling reveal parrot tool use is not rare.iScience · 2025Article
- The Relationship Between Relative Brain Size and Avoidance of Vehicular Collisions in Birds is Subtle.Zoological studies · 2025Article
- Linking the evolution of two prefrontal brain regions to social and foraging challenges in primates.eLife · 2024Article
- How domestication, feralization and experience-dependent plasticity affect brain size variation inRoyal Society open science · 2024Article
- Evolution of neural circuitry and cognition.Biology letters · 2024Review
- Article
- A Comparative Perspective on the Cerebello-Cerebral System and Its Link to Cognition.Cerebellum (London, England) · 2023Review
- Phylogenetic comparative analysis of the cerebello-cerebral system in 34 species highlights primate-general expansion of cerebellar crura I-II.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Explaining the primate extinction crisis: predictors of extinction risk and active threats.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Comparative studies have identified a wide range of behavioural and ecological correlates of relative brain size, with results differing between taxonomic groups, and even within them. In primates for example, recent studies contradict one another over whether social or ecological factors are critical. A basic assumption of such studies is that with sufficiently large samples and appropriate analysis, robust correlations indicative of selection pressures on cognition will emerge. We carried out a comprehensive re-examination of correlates of primate brain size using two large comparative datasets and phylogenetic comparative methods. We found evidence in both datasets for associations between brain size and ecological variables (home range size, diet and activity period), but little evidence for an effect of social group size, a correlation which has previously formed the empirical basis of the Social Brain Hypothesis. However, reflecting divergent results in the literature, our results exhibited instability across datasets, even when they were matched for species composition and predictor variables. We identify several potential empirical and theoretical difficulties underlying this instability and suggest that these issues raise doubts about inferring cognitive selection pressures from behavioural correlates of brain size.
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