Abstract
Cognitive abilities covary with both social and ecological factors across animal taxa. Ecological generalists have been attributed with enhanced cognitive abilities, but which specific ecological factors may have shaped the evolution of which specific cognitive abilities remains poorly known. To explore these links, we applied a cognitive test battery (two personality, ten cognitive tests; n = 1104 tests) to wild individuals of two sympatric mouse lemur species (n = 120 Microcebus murinus, n = 34 M. berthae) varying in ecological adaptations but sharing key features of their social systems. The habitat and dietary generalist grey mouse lemurs were more innovative and exhibited better spatial learning abilities; a cognitive advantage in responding adaptively to dynamic environmental conditions. The more specialized Madame Berthe's mouse lemurs were faster in learning associative reward contingencies, providing relative advantages in stable environmental conditions. Hence, our study revealed key cognitive correlates of ecological adaptations and indicates potential cognitive constraints of specialists that may help explain why they face a greater extinction risk in the context of current environmental changes.
Highlights
The evolution of cognitive abilities has been linked to variation in brain size, which covaries across species with social factors and/ or ecological challenges
Recent comparative analyses across primates suggested that evolutionary variation in brain size is better predicted by ecological than social factors [3]
To better understand the evolution of cognitive abilities and the underlying variation in brain size, studies of how variation in specific ecological or social factors are linked to performance in cognitive tests across taxa are required
Summary
The evolution of cognitive abilities has been linked to variation in brain size, which covaries across species with social factors (social intelligence hypothesis [1]) and/ or ecological challenges (ecological intelligence hypothesis [2]). To examine cognitive performances in tasks without obvious ecological relevance [4] (i.e. cognitive abilities that are not expected to covary with the degree of ecological specialization) we assessed variation in inhibitory control, means–end understanding and goal directedness (see electronic supplementary material for justification and predictions; figure 1). For the second PAF, we used performance scores of individuals that completed all tests, except for the discrimination 4 and reversal learning paradigm, resulting in a larger sample size (n = 76 GML, n = 19 MBML). For the second PCA per species, we excluded all performance scores of the repeated discrimination and reversal learning paradigm, achieving a sample size of n = 76 GML and n = 19 MBML. For each PCA, we controlled for sphericity by applying Bartlett’s test and for sampling adequacy by applying the KMO
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