Cognitive Phenotypes and the Evolution of Animal Decisions.
Despite the clear fitness consequences of animal decisions, the science of animal decision making in evolutionary biology is underdeveloped compared with decision science in human psychology. Specifically, the field lacks a conceptual framework that defines and describes the relevant components of a decision, leading to imprecise language and concepts. The 'judgment and decision-making' (JDM) framework in human psychology is a powerful tool for framing and understanding human decisions, and we apply it here to components of animal decisions, which we refer to as 'cognitive phenotypes'. We distinguish multiple cognitive phenotypes in the context of a JDM framework and highlight empirical approaches to characterize them as evolvable traits.
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD 21250, USA. Electronic address: tamram@umbc.edu.
Tamra C
TC
Mendelson
Department of Biology, Duke University, Durham, NC 27705, USA.
Courtney L
CL
Fitzpatrick
Department of Psychology, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY 10065, USA.
Mark E
ME
Hauber
Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA.
Charles H
CH
Pence
Behavioral and Molecular Ecology Group, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI 53201, USA.
Rafael L
RL
Rodríguez
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309, USA.
Rebecca J
RJ
Safran
Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA.
Caitlin A
CA
Stern
Department of Psychology and Center for Brain, Biology and Behavior, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588, USA.
Jeffrey R
JR
Stevens
D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D003071:Cognition; D010641:Phenotype
choice; cognitive phenotype; discrimination; judgment and decision making; preference; recognition