The Development and Evolution of Social Intelligence

为什么动物在记忆或任务学习等心理能力上有很大的差异？有些动物在看似简单的任务上失败了，而另一些动物则具有学习困难任务、回忆复杂信息和解决复杂问题的非凡能力。有人认为，为了处理社会群体中的关系，动物需要变得聪明。与这一观点相一致的是，生活在复杂社会群体中的动物，就像我们在人类身上看到的那样，通常比非社会动物更聪明。虽然比较多种动物的心理能力提供了影响动物智力因素的重要信息，但大型比较分析的结果很少是确定的或易于解释的。该项目将采用一种新的实验方法来理解动物智力物种内变异的原因和后果。使用一种已经发现了记忆和学习差异的黄蜂，个体和群体的成功将与群体成员学习和记忆社会联系和经验的能力进行比较。这项工作的发现可以帮助我们更好地理解社会行为对智力的影响，并更好地理解为什么包括人类在内的生物体会被社会环境和群体所吸引。科学教育将是这个项目的重要组成部分，包括为学生提供研究机会，以及为中学生制作一本利用动物行为研究向学生传授科学方法的漫画书。这项提议的工作将使用褐斑黄蜂作为模型来测试社会智力变化的原因和后果。尽管人们对社会行为和智力之间的关系进行了数十年的比较研究，但之前没有研究测试过选择是如何以及何时对社会智力起作用的。fuscatus为这项工作提供了一个很好的模型，因为它们在日常互动中使用个体面部识别。学习和记忆独特的个体可以形成个体差异化的社会关系，这是一项具有挑战性的任务，被认为是提高社会智力的选择。fuscatus在学习和记忆独特同种特征的能力方面也表现出广泛的物种内差异。该项目有两个主要目标。1)检验产生社会智力种内变异的因素，包括社会经验、营养和基因型对认知变异的影响。确定基因型和环境如何相互作用以产生社会智力的变化对于理解选择如何作用于这一特征是很重要的。2)测试社会智力变异的后果。社会认知能力强的个体在社会互动中是否比社会认知能力弱的个体受益？这一目标将提供第一个社会智力选择结果的种内分析，测试一个关键的，未经测试的社会智力假设预测。

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.