ArticleNature ecology & evolution2024
Problem-solving skills are predicted by technical innovations in the wild and brain size in passerines.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- T. rex cognition was T. rex-like-A critical outlook on diverging views of the neurocognitive evolution in dinosaurs.Anatomical record (Hoboken, N.J. : 2007) · 2026Review
- To pull or push? Performance of four passerine species in the lever-pulling task.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- The flexible, the stereotyped and the in-between: putting together the combinatory tool use origins hypothesis.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- The evolutionary puzzle of cognition: challenges and insights from individual-based studies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Evidence of self-care tooling and phylogenetic modeling reveal parrot tool use is not rare.iScience · 2025Article
- NSF Workshop Report: Exploring Measurements and Interpretations of Intelligent Behaviors Across Animal Model Systems.The Journal of comparative neurology · 2025Article
- Seizing opportunities: Object neophobia as a factor mediating technical innovation in Goffin´s cockatoos?PloS one · 2025Article
- The Relationship Between Relative Brain Size and Avoidance of Vehicular Collisions in Birds is Subtle.Zoological studies · 2025Article
- Looking back on 2024.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Sex predicts response to novelty and problem-solving in a wild bird with female-biased sexual dimorphism.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Behavioral flexibility and its drivers in semi-urban vervet monkeys.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Behavioural innovations can provide key advantages for animals in the wild, especially when ecological conditions change rapidly and unexpectedly. Innovation rates can be compared across taxa by compiling field reports of novel behaviours. Large-scale analyses have shown that innovativeness reduces extinction risk, increases colonization success and is associated with increased brain size and pallial neuron numbers. However, appropriate laboratory measurements of innovativeness, necessary to conduct targeted experimental studies, have not been clearly established, despite decades of speculation on the most suitable assay. Here we implemented a battery of cognitive tasks on 203 birds of 15 passerine species and tested for relationships at the interspecific and intraspecific levels with ecological metrics of innovation and brain size. We found that species better at solving extractive foraging problems had higher technical innovation rates in the wild and larger brains. By contrast, performance on other cognitive tasks often subsumed under the term behavioural flexibility, namely, associative and reversal learning, as well as self-control, were not related to problem-solving, innovation in the wild or brain size. Our study yields robust support for problem-solving as an accurate experimental proxy of innovation and suggests that novel motor solutions are more important than self-control or learning of modified cues in generating technical innovations in the wild.
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