The Development and Evolution of Social Intelligence

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Why do animals have strong variation in mental abilities like memory or task learning? Some animals fail at apparently simple tasks, while others have a remarkable capacity to learn difficult tasks, recall complex information, and solve complex problems. It is suggested that animals need to be smart in order to manage relationships within social groups. Consistent with this idea, animals that live in complex social groups, like we see in humans, are typically smarter than non-social animals. Although comparing mental abilities across many types of animals has provided important information about the factors that influence animal intelligence, results from large comparative analyses are rarely definitive or easy to interpret. This project will take a new, experimental approach to understanding the causes and consequences of within species variation in animal intelligence. Using a wasp species where variation in memory and learning has already been found, individual and colony success will be compared to the ability of the colony members to learn and remember social contacts and experiences. Findings from this work can help to better understand the impacts of social behavior on intelligence and provide a better understanding for why organisms, including humans, gravitate to social settings and groups. Science education will be an important component of this project, including research opportunities for students as well as production of a comic book for middle school students that uses animal behavior research to teach students the scientific method.The proposed work will use Polistes fuscatus wasps as a model to test the causes and consequences of variation in social intelligence. Despite decades of comparative work on the relationship between social behavior and intelligence, no previous studies have tested how and when selection acts on social intelligence. P. fuscatus provide a good model for this work because they use individual face recognition in daily interactions. Learning and remembering unique individuals allows the formation of individually differentiated social relationships, a challenging task that is thought to select for enhanced social intelligence. P. fuscatus also show extensive within-species variation in the ability to learn and remember unique conspecifics. The project has two main goals. 1) Test the factors that produce intraspecific variation in social intelligence, including the effects of social experience, nutrition, and genotype on cognitive variation. Identifying how genotype and the environment interact to produce variation in social intelligence is important to understand how selection acts on this trait. 2) Test the consequences of variation in social intelligence. Do individuals with enhanced social cognition benefit during social interactions relative to individuals with lesser social cognition? This aim will provide the first intraspecific analysis of the selective consequences of social intelligence, testing a critical, untested prediction of the social intelligence hypothesis.