The evolution of self-control
By E. MacLean, Brian Hare, Charles L. Nunn, E. Addessi, F. Amici, Rindy C. Anderson, Filippo Aureli, J. M. Baker, Amanda E. Bania, Allison M. Barnard and 48 more. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014
681 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Significance Although scientists have identified surprising cognitive flexibility in animals and potentially unique features of human psychology, we know less about the selective forces that favor cognitive evolution, or the proximate biological mechanisms underlying this process. We tested 36 species in two problem-solving tasks measuring self-control and evaluated the leading hypotheses regarding how and why cognition evolves. Across species, differences in absolute (not relative) brain volume best predicted performance on these tasks. Within primates, dietary breadth also predicted cognitive performance, whereas social group size did not. These results suggest that increases in absolute brain size provided the biological foundation for evolutionary increases in self-control, and implicate species differences in feeding ecology as a potential selective pressure favoring these skills. 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.
Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/552f5f8db9ad81f44a9ee7ed83e2c01e0e4509e3
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Citations in the corpus
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- Comprehensive transcriptional map of primate brain development (2016, methodology): “We identified four major expression patterns: (1) postnatal cortical plate, (2) prenatal germinal layers, (3) prenatal subventricular zone and cortical plate, and (4) more complex patterns spanning development (Fig.”