SEMINAR: Understanding the relationship between cognition and sociality using experiments in wild, free-living populations

The Seminar: Cooperation may present unique cognitive challenges. Individuals in cooperative groups perform behaviours that provide fitness benefits to others, exposing themselves to the risk of exploitation, yet they are also presented with opportunities to gain benefits unavailable to solitary individuals. Individuals that live in groups could therefore have an advantage over solitary individuals in their ability to develop cognitive skills because social interactions may contribute to neural and cognitive development and provide opportunities for them to learn from the skills of other group members. While both cognition and cooperation have been extensively studied for several decades, the relationship between the two is not well understood. Comparative evidence suggests that there is a relationship between cognitive ability and social complexity, but the effect of variation in social structure within species on the development of individual cognitive ability is unknown. Experimental evidence for a link between cognition and sociality is particularly lacking in wild, free-living populations. Here, I will present the cognitive research that we are conducting on groups of free-living, habituated West Australian magpies in an attempt to answer some of these questions.

The Speaker: Associate Professor Amanda Ridley is an ARC Future Fellow based in the School of Animal Biology, UWA. Amanda's research primarily involves investigating the causes and consequences of cooperative breeding behaviour in habituated wild populations. Amanda started her research into cooperation as a Ph.D. based at Cambridge University, UK. She set up her own long-term research population in the Kalahari desert during her postdoc. That research project, on the cooperatively breeding pied babbler, still runs today. Since moving to Perth two years ago, Amanda has set up a research project on the cooperatively breeding Western Australian Magpie. Please visit www.babbler-research.com for more info about Mandy and her research lab.