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The role of natural history in animal cognition

A. Thornton,N. Truskanov

Published 2022 in Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences

ABSTRACT

Animals’ cognitive processes are shaped by the challenges they face in their environments over developmental and evolutionary time, but cognitive studies are often disconnected from these challenges. Here, we argue that a failure to ground research in natural history can inadvertently misdirect research efforts and make results difficult to interpret. We highlight these potential pitfalls using a series of case studies and consider how field research, ecologically informed lab studies and formal theory can offer potential solutions. Animal cognition research is entering an exciting new phase, with technological advances providing opportunities to tackle previously intractable questions, both in the lab and in the wild, while mathematical models are increasingly helping to strengthen the field’s theoretical foundations. Placing natural history at the centre of this work will be crucial to ensure that we capitalise on these advances to build a robust understanding of the proximate and ultimate basis of animal cognition. Using experiments on wild-caught vampire bats, the authors demon-strate that relationships between unfamiliar individuals are initially formed through ‘low-cost’ exchanges that enable individuals to test the waters, before transitioning to exchanging more costly blood-meal do- nations. A ‘transmission-chain’ experiment showing that in homing pigeons, beneficial modifications of collective movement can accumulate over time, indicative of cumulative cultural evolution. Repeated removal and replacement of individuals pigeons led to an improvement in flight route efficiency compared with the routes of fixed groups or individual pi- geons. This study shows that the ability of ungulate populations to track and follow changes in resource availability, improves across generations as cultural knowledge accumulates. Translocated populations were less likely than historical populations to migrate following phenological changes in vegetation cover, and their migratory roots became more established and improved with time.

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