School of Biological Sciences, The University of Sydney Sydney, NSW, Australia ; The Charles Perkins Centre, The University of Sydney Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Front Physiol. 2012 Nov 27;3:442. doi: 10.3389/fphys.2012.00442. eCollection 2012.
The "social brain hypothesis" posits that the cognitive demands of sociality have driven the evolution of substantially enlarged brains in primates and some other mammals. Whether such reasoning can apply to all social animals is an open question. Here we examine the evolutionary relationships between sociality, cognition, and brain size in insects, a taxonomic group characterized by an extreme sophistication of social behaviors and relatively simple nervous systems. We discuss the application of the social brain hypothesis in this group, based on comparative studies of brain volumes across species exhibiting various levels of social complexity. We illustrate how some of the major behavioral innovations of social insects may in fact require little information-processing and minor adjustments of neural circuitry, thus potentially selecting for more specialized rather than bigger brains. We argue that future work aiming to understand how animal behavior, cognition, and brains are shaped by the environment (including social interactions) should focus on brain functions and identify neural circuitry correlates of social tasks, not only brain sizes.
“社会脑假说”认为，社交的认知需求推动了灵长类动物和其他一些哺乳动物的大脑大幅扩大。这种推理是否适用于所有社会性动物，这是一个悬而未决的问题。在这里，我们研究了昆虫的社会性、认知和大脑大小之间的进化关系，昆虫是一个具有极其复杂的社会行为和相对简单的神经系统的分类群。我们根据对表现出不同程度社会复杂性的物种的脑容量进行的比较研究，讨论了该假说在这一群体中的应用。我们说明了事实上，一些社会性昆虫的主要行为创新可能只需要很少的信息处理和对神经回路的微小调整，从而可能选择更专业化而不是更大的大脑。我们认为，未来旨在了解动物行为、认知和大脑如何受到环境（包括社会互动）影响的工作应该专注于大脑功能，并确定社会任务的神经回路相关性，而不仅仅是大脑大小。
