Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 111, Issue 20, Pages E2140-E2148Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1323533111
Keywords
psychology; behavior; comparative methods; inhibitory control; executive function
Categories
Funding
- National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent)
- National Science Foundation (NSF) [EF-0905606]
- NSF [BCS-0923791, DGE-1106401, NSF-BCS-27552, NSF-BCS-25172]
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [31170995]
- National Basic Research Program (973 Program) [2010CB833904]
- Newton International Fellowship from the Royal Society
- British Academy
- James S. McDonnell Foundation [220020242]
- National Institutes of Mental Health [R01-MH096875, R01-MH089484]
- Duke Institute for Brain Sciences Incubator Award
- Duke Center for Interdisciplinary Decision Sciences Fellowship
- Programma Nazionale per la Ricerca-Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) Aging Program
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) [20220004]
- European Community [012-984 NESTPathfinder, 043318]
- Humboldt Research Fellowship [1138999]
- NSF Electrical, Communications, and Cyber Systems [1028319]
- NSF
- JSPS [21264]
- Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [P21244-B17]
- European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union [311870]
- Vienna Science and Technology Fund Project [CS11-026]
- National Institutes of Health [5 R03 HD070649-02]
- Royal Canin
- [10J04395]
- Directorate For Engineering [1028319] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Div Of Electrical, Commun & Cyber Sys [1028319] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Div Of Electrical, Commun & Cyber Sys
- Directorate For Engineering [1028237] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research [25118002, 12J08353, 26119514] Funding Source: KAKEN
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Cognition presents evolutionary research with one of its greatest challenges. Cognitive evolution has been explained at the proximate level by shifts in absolute and relative brain volume and at the ultimate level by differences in social and dietary complexity. However, no study has integrated the experimental and phylogenetic approach at the scale required to rigorously test these explanations. Instead, previous research has largely relied on various measures of brain size as proxies for cognitive abilities. We experimentally evaluated these major evolutionary explanations by quantitatively comparing the cognitive performance of 567 individuals representing 36 species on two problem-solving tasks measuring self-control. Phylogenetic analysis revealed that absolute brain volume best predicted performance across species and accounted for considerably more variance than brain volume controlling for body mass. This result corroborates recent advances in evolutionary neurobiology and illustrates the cognitive consequences of cortical reorganization through increases in brain volume. Within primates, dietary breadth but not social group size was a strong predictor of species differences in self-control. Our results implicate robust evolutionary relationships between dietary breadth, absolute brain volume, and self-control. These findings provide a significant first step toward quantifying the primate cognitive phenome and explaining the process of cognitive evolution.
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