The coevolution of cognition and sociality

Abstract

Cognition serves to resolve uncertainty. Living in social groups is widely seen as a source of uncertainty driving cognitive evolution, but sociality can also mitigate sources of uncertainty, reducing the need for cognition. Moreover, social systems are not simply external selection pressures but rather arise from the decisions individuals make regarding who to interact with and how to behave. Thus, an understanding of how and why cognition evolves requires careful consideration of the coevolutionary feedback loop between cognition and sociality. Here, we adopt ideas from information theory to evaluate how potential sources of uncertainty differ across species and social systems. Whereas cognitive research often focuses on identifying human-like abilities in other animals, we instead emphasize that animals need to make adaptive decisions to navigate socio-ecological trade-offs. These decisions can be viewed as feedback loops between perceiving and acting on information, which shape individuals' immediate social interactions and scale up to generate the structure of societies. Emerging group-level characteristics such as social structure, communication networks and culture in turn produce the context in which decisions are made and so shape selection on the underlying cognitive processes. Thus, minds shape societies and societies shape minds.This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue 'Selection shapes diverse animal minds'.

Keywords: coevolutionary feedback loop; cognition; information; sociality; socio-ecological trade-off; uncertainty.

Figure 1.

Coevolutionary feedback loop between cognition and sociality. Minds shape societies via bottom-up processes (arrow 1), and societies shape minds via top-down processes (arrow 2). Societies can be conceptualized as social networks of interactions between individuals in different contexts, such as grooming or mating (symbolized by lines between individuals, with colours representing different social contexts). The social network provides the context for and is shaped by individual decision-making. Individual decision-making unfolds through a perception–action feedback loop (arrows 3 and 4; see §4) by which individuals use and update their knowledge to increase their payoffs. Individual decisions and group outcomes (e.g. social structure) are embedded in and influenced by external ecological factors, such as resource availability and distribution. Animal icons from PhyloPic (Fabio Machado and Kai Caspar).

Figure 2.

Perception–action feedback loops to overcome socio-ecological trade-offs in biological markets. Here, a focal individual (black) perceives two potential foraging partners and makes subsequent decisions. In this instance, memory of past payoffs (prior) suggest that the two other individuals yield similar payoffs (i.e. there is more uncertainty). New informational input about payoffs, decreasing uncertainty, allows the focal individual to decide about whom to associate with (posterior; bold arrow). This has bottom-up consequences for social structure, which influences whom an individual encounters and who may provide payoffs to that individual in the future. Animal icons from PhyloPic (Anthony Caravaggi).