Abstract
It is uncontroversial that land animals have more elaborated cognitive abilities than their aquatic counterparts such as fish. Yet there is no apparent a-priori reason for this. A key cognitive faculty is planning. We show that in visually guided predator-prey interactions, planning provides a significant advantage, but only on land. During animal evolution, the water-to-land transition resulted in a massive increase in visual range. Simulations of behavior identify a specific type of terrestrial habitat, clustered open and closed areas (savanna-like), where the advantage of planning peaks. Our computational experiments demonstrate how this patchy terrestrial structure, in combination with enhanced visual range, can reveal and hide agents as a function of their movement and create a selective benefit for imagining, evaluating, and selecting among possible future scenarios—in short, for planning. The vertebrate invasion of land may have been an important step in their cognitive evolution.
Highlights
It is uncontroversial that land animals have more elaborated cognitive abilities than their aquatic counterparts such as fish
Within the greatly enhanced range of Devonian aerial vision was rich structure provided by vegetation[3] and terrestrial topography, resulting in environments with greater complexity compared to aquatic habitats[4] (Supplementary Fig. 2a–c)
While the increase in time-to-act extended the available time for deliberation, the concomitant increase in spatial complexity may have been essential in increasing the number of potential future scenarios, which depend on the dynamics of the agents involved (Supplementary Fig. 2d–f)
Summary
It is uncontroversial that land animals have more elaborated cognitive abilities than their aquatic counterparts such as fish. Whereas an aquatic animal has to make decisions on the order of a second with limited information, the same animal on land has at least 100 times longer and much more information This increase in time-to-act—while a necessary condition for deliberation2—may not have been a sufficient condition for the evolution of planning in dynamic scenarios. While there has been significant research into neural systems involved with habit and planning in tasks with stationary rewards[18] (termed habitizable), the role that increased visual range and environmental complexity might have played in altering the relative advantage of these two decision making systems in dynamic tasks with high reward uncertainty (termed non-habitizable) has not yet been explored. We test the hypothesis that in non-habitizable scenarios, plan-based action selection is advantaged in proportion to visual range and environmental complexity. In spatially complex environments that featured clustered open and closed areas—not unlike savannas—the existence of multiple viable futures maximally advantaged planning and caused habit to fail
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