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How can we study the evolution of animal minds?

Maxime Cauchoix, Alexis Chaine
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/024422
Maxime Cauchoix
Department of Biology, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, CanadaInstitute for Advanced study in Toulouse, Toulouse, France
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  • For correspondence: mcauchoixxx@gmail.com
Alexis Chaine
Station for Experimental Ecology in Moulis, CNRS, Moulis, France
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Abstract

During the last 50 years, comparative cognition and neurosciences have improved our understanding of animal minds while evolutionary ecology has revealed how selection acts on traits through evolutionary time. We describe how this evolutionary approach can be used to understand the evolution of animal cognition. We recount how comparative and fitness methods have been used to understand the evolution of cognition and outline how these methods could be extended to gain new insights into cognitive evolution. The fitness approach, in particular, offers unprecedented opportunities to study the evolutionary mechanisms responsible for variation in cognition within species and could allow us to investigate both proximate (ie: neural and developmental) and ultimate (ie: ecological and evolutionary) underpinnings of animal cognition together. Our goal in this review is to build a bridge between cognitive neuroscientist and evolutionary biologists, illustrate how their research could be complementary, and encourage evolutionary ecologists to include explicit attention to cognitive processes in their studies of behaviour. We believe that in doing so, we can break new ground in our understanding of the evolution of cognition as well as gain a much better understanding of animal behaviour.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.
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Posted September 01, 2015.
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How can we study the evolution of animal minds?
Maxime Cauchoix, Alexis Chaine
bioRxiv 024422; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/024422
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How can we study the evolution of animal minds?
Maxime Cauchoix, Alexis Chaine
bioRxiv 024422; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/024422

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