ReviewLearning & behavior2020
Behavioral flexibility: A review, a model, and some exploratory tests.
Review in Learning & behavior, 2020. 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
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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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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.
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Who cites it
34 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Primates and disability: Behavioral flexibility and implications for resilience to environmental change.American journal of primatology · 2025Pooled it
- Evolution of behavioral flexibility and the forming and breaking of habits.Evolution letters · 2026Article
- Sex-specific behavioral feedback modulates sensorimotor processing and drives flexible social behavior.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Exploring the relationship between inhibitory control and coping behaviour in horses.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Male bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) are more active and behaviourally flexible than workers.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Recognising dog movement with behaviour-specific machine learning models: bout length as a biologically relevant parameter for window size.BMC veterinary research · 2026Article
- Cognitive reserve and adaptive resilience: a conceptual analysis of a cross-species framework for neuropsychology and cognitive aging.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- From welfare indicator to welfare contributor: the role of play in building flexibility and resilience in captive animals.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Beyond criterion: cognitive flexibility in wild striated caracaras.Biology letters · 2025Article
- How cognitively demanding is the urban niche? Reconsidering exaptation and habituation.Animal cognition · 2025Review
- Parental control: ecology drives plasticity in parental response to offspring signals.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology · 2025Article
- Innovation, Inhibition and Flexibility in Rhesus Macaques (Macaca mulatta).American journal of primatology · 2025Article
- Serial visual reversal learning in captive black-handed spider monkeys, Ateles geoffroyi.Animal cognition · 2024Article
- Wild raccoons demonstrate flexibility and individuality in innovative problem-solving.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- A social learning primacy trend in mate-copying: an experiment inRoyal Society open science · 2024Article
- Article
- Cultural sustainability through social networks: a moderated mediation model exploring the psychological dimensions of cultural dissemination.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Inhibition of midbrain cholinergic neurons impairs decision-making strategies during reversal learning.Frontiers in molecular neuroscience · 2024Article
- Multisite regulation integrates multimodal context in sensory circuits to control persistent behavioral states in C. elegans.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Assessing sex differences in behavioural flexibility in an endangered bird species: the Southern ground-hornbill (Bucorvus leadbeateri).Animal cognition · 2023Article
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
This paper aimed to explore and clarify the concept of behavioral flexibility. A selective literature review explored how the concept of behavioral flexibility has been used in ways that range from acknowledging the fact that animals' behavior is not always bounded by instinctual constraints, to describing the variation between species in their capacity for innovative foraging, a capacity that has repeatedly been linked to having a brain larger than would be predicted from body size. This wide range of usages of a single term has led to some conceptual confusion. We sought to find a more precise meaning for behavioral flexibility by representing it within a simple formal model of problem solving. The key to our model is to distinguish between an animal's state of knowledge about the world and its observable behavior, using a construct of response strength to represent that underlying knowledge. We modelled behavioral flexibility as a parameter in the function that transforms response strengths into observable response probabilities. We tested this model in simulations based on some recent experimental work on animal problem solving. Initial results showed that parametric manipulation can mimic some of the behavioral effects that have been attributed to flexibility.
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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.