Abstract
Behavioral innovation, the capacity to invent new behavior patterns, may have played a pivotal role in primate brain evolution. Innovation rate can be operationally measured for primate species by collating reports of novel behavior patterns from the published literature, providing an ecologically relevant measure of cognitive ability. Comparative analyses have revealed correlations between innovation rate and species’ relative neocortex volumes, after correcting for phylogeny and differences in research effort. Thus, primate brain size and one measure of cognitive capacity, innovation rate, are correlated. Moreover, innovation rate correlates with a number of other cognitive measures (social learning, tool use, individual learning), suggesting that these capacities have evolved together. However, the psychological, neural, and genetic mechanisms underlying innovation remain to be fully elucidated.
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