The Rockefeller University Field Research Center, Millbrook, NY, USA.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Chevy Chase, MD, USA.
Nat Ecol Evol. 2024 Apr;8(4):806-816. doi: 10.1038/s41559-024-02342-7. Epub 2024 Feb 22.
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.
行为创新可为野生动物提供关键优势，尤其是当生态条件快速且意外变化时。通过编译关于新颖行为的野外报告，可以跨分类群比较创新率。大规模分析表明，创新性降低灭绝风险，增加殖民成功率，并与大脑大小和脑皮层神经元数量增加相关。然而，尽管对最合适的测定方法进行了数十年的推测，但仍未明确建立创新性的适当实验室测量方法，这对于开展有针对性的实验研究是必要的。在这里，我们对 15 种雀形目鸟类中的 203 只鸟类实施了一系列认知任务，并在种间和种内水平上测试了与创新和大脑大小的生态度量指标的关系。我们发现，在解决提取性觅食问题方面表现更好的物种在野外具有更高的技术创新率和更大的大脑。相比之下，通常归入行为灵活性范畴的其他认知任务的表现，即联想学习和反转学习以及自我控制，与解决问题、野外创新或大脑大小无关。我们的研究为解决问题作为创新的准确实验替代物提供了有力支持，并表明在野外产生技术创新时，新颖的运动解决方案比自我控制或修改线索的学习更为重要。
