Co-evolution of social relationships and cognition: a theoretical investigation

The cognitive demands of maintaining social relationships are argued to underlie apparent co-evolutionary patterns between various social traits and cognitive complexity. Presumably, this cognitive demand arises from some need to gather and process social cues but we have a poor understanding of the value of these social cues, which may be noisy, expensive to gather, and contain information whose strategic benefit is yet unclear. Therefore, to disambiguate the adaptive value of noisy and expensive social cues, we modelled the adaptive dynamics of populations in three social contexts---divorce, nest building, and parental care---wherein partners are uncertain of one another's state. In two of these cases we found social cue use generated unexpected uncertainty dynamics, with divorce characterised by negative social information feedback (social cue use decreases the value of social cues) and parental care characterised by positive social information feedback (social cue use increases the value of social cues). For the nest building model we found supporting evidence for the value of social cues for learning about the climate and found that expensive social cues are only gathered when individuals have intermediate decision error rates in nest building. It is also not clear how cognitive demands relate to measures of cognitive complexity. To disambiguate this relationship we conducted a literature review of the mechanisms of cognition across levels of biological organisation and a framework for understanding how these systems may differ in their use of cues to develop adaptive phenotypes.<p></p>

Author dc:creator

• Tristan Canterbury (21041597)

• Social information
• Cue integration
• Endogenous uncertainty
• Long-term pair bonds
• Life-history
• Social feedback
• Mathematical modelling
• Behavioural ecology
• Jackdaws
• Agent based models
• Stochastic dynamic programming
• Dynamic games
• Divorce
• Nest Building
• Parental care
• Developmental plasticity

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved

Identifier

10779/exe.32880437.v1

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:figshare.com:article/32880437