ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2025
Living on the edge: the evolution of spatial cognition in food-caching chickadees.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 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
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Linking social attention to reproductive state and future reproduction in female monkeys.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2026Article
- Replicate geographic transects across a hybrid zone reveal parallelism and differences in the genetic architecture of reproductive isolation.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- Selection shapes diverse animal minds.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Modality-specific long-term memory enhancement inPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- 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
- The coevolution of cognition and sociality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Demonstrating the reproductive consequences of cognition: learning from experience.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
There is a tremendous amount of intra- and inter-specific variation in animal cognitive abilities, and understanding the evolutionary mechanisms generating such variation is an important issue in evolutionary biology. Here we review our research on spatial cognition in food-caching chickadees, which use spatial cognitive abilities to recover previously made food caches to survive harsh winters. This work ranges from comparing multiple populations along environmental gradients to investigating the causes and consequences of individual variation in spatial learning and memory abilities, to describing the genetic basis of such variation. Our data show that (i) chickadees in harsher environments have better spatial cognitive abilities and a larger hippocampus with more hippocampal neurons, with differences between populations persisting in common garden experiments; (ii) chickadees tested in the wild show extensive individual variation in their learning and memory abilities; (iii) this variation is highly heritable and has a genetic basis; and (iv) this variation is associated with significant differences in survival, lifespan and reproductive success. Overall, our data provide strong evidence that spatial cognitive abilities in food-caching chickadees are shaped by natural selection, which generates differences among populations living across heterogeneous environmental conditions.This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue 'Selection shapes diverse animal minds'.
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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.