University of Nevada Reno, Reno, NV, USA.
The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada.
Science. 2024 Sep 6;385(6713):1111-1115. doi: 10.1126/science.adn5633. Epub 2024 Sep 5.
Cognitive abilities are hypothesized to affect survival and life span in nonhuman animals. However, most tests of this hypothesis have relied on interspecific comparisons of indirect measures of cognitive ability, such as brain size. We present direct evidence that individual variation in cognitive abilities is associated with differences in life span in a wild food caching bird. We measured the spatial cognitive abilities and tracked the life span of 227 mountain chickadees () in their natural environment and found that individuals with better spatial learning and memory abilities involved in food caching lived longer. These results confirm that enhanced cognitive abilities can be associated with longer life in wild animals and that selection on cognitive abilities can lead to increased life span.
认知能力被假设会影响非人类动物的生存和寿命。然而，大多数检验该假设的研究都依赖于对认知能力的间接衡量指标进行种间比较，如大脑大小。我们提供了直接的证据表明，在一种野生的食物贮藏鸟类中，个体认知能力的差异与寿命的差异有关。我们测量了 227 只高山雀鹀的空间认知能力并跟踪了它们的寿命，发现那些在食物贮藏中表现出更好的空间学习和记忆能力的个体寿命更长。这些结果证实了在野生动物中，增强的认知能力可以与更长的寿命相关，并且认知能力的选择可以导致寿命的延长。
