Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

A vast range of species, from humans to ants, live in groups, and thus all of their behaviors - foraging, making decisions, learning - and the cognitive processes that underlie them, happen in the context of the group and will be influenced by the group. For example, we know that choosing where to search for food is affected by both social information derived from observing others and personal information based on past experience. How humans and animals balance these two things is an important question, with implications for how we motivate collective action on issues from climate change to masking mandates. However, it is also possible to take the reverse approach: any group is composed of individuals, so the behavioral repertoire of the group, what I call its social structure, is determined by the cognitive skills and limitations of the individuals that comprise it. For example, there will not be rigid hierarchies in species whose members cannot identify other individuals (many species cannot). In this proposal I aim to study how social structures are related to the cognitive abilities of individuals. I take a comparative approach to this question, using several species of fish and snakes, that have very different social structures and cognitive architectures. Fish social behavior has been intensely studied from the individual perspective, while snake cognition is severely understudied. Both groups display much simpler social structures than humans, which will make it easier to answer questions about the evolution and mechanisms of fundamental social behaviors that are shared widely across species. I will take four approaches to these questions: 1. Manipulating the social context - such as the familiarity of group-mates - can alter the interactions and resulting dynamics of the group in complex ways. 2. Exploring how the personality composition of a group shapes its social structure and cohesiveness (if everyone is very aggressive, does the group disintegrate?), with applications to human group formation and leadership. 3. Manipulating individual cognition, using pharmacological methods, to see whether group behavior is resilient to the loss or modification of some cognitive functions in some members. 4. Comparing data from animal experiments to theoretical models of the same behaviors, which allow us to identify general principles of social behavior and compare how they are expressed in different systems. Social organization is fundamental to human and animal cognition. Both language and culture, for example, are manifestations of it. This research will reveal some of the fundamental cognitive mechanisms through which social structures are built, and allow us to better understand, manage, and conserve a world full of social species.