Big cats as a model system for the study of the evolution of intelligence.
Currently, carnivores, and felids in particular, are vastly underrepresented in cognitive literature, despite being an ideal model system for tests of social and ecological intelligence hypotheses. Within Felidae, big cats (Panthera) are uniquely suited to studies investigating the evolutionary links between social, ecological, and cognitive complexity. Intelligence likely did not evolve in a unitary way but instead evolved as the result of mutually reinforcing feedback loops within the physical and social environments. The domain-specific social intelligence hypothesis proposes that social complexity drives only the evolution of cognitive abilities adapted only to social domains. The domain-general hypothesis proposes that the unique demands of social life serve as a bootstrap for the evolution of superior general cognition. Big cats are one of the few systems in which we can directly address conflicting predictions of the domain-general and domain-specific hypothesis by comparing cognition among closely related species that face roughly equivalent ecological complexity but vary considerably in social complexity.
Department of Life Sciences, University of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa; Lion Research Center, Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, University of Minnesota, South Africa. Electronic address: nborrego@umn.edu.
Natalia
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Borrego
D000818:Animals; D005075:Biological Evolution; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology; D007360:Intelligence / Q000502:physiology*; D008954:Models, Biological; D046009:Panthera / Q000523:psychology*; D012931:Social Environment
Big cats; Cognitive evolution; Lions (Panthera Leo); Panthera; Social Intelligence