Meeting Abstract
Among the various forms of vertebrate cognition, spatial cognition and navigation appear universally dependent on the hippocampus of all tetrapods and possibly teleost fish as well. Co-occurring with this general uniformity are differences in the hippocampal-dependent representation of space among vertebrate groups that presumably reflect adaptive variation. Yet surprisingly, little is known about how variation in the organization and function of the hippocampus in different vertebrate groups can be explained by genetic variation. Here patterns of developmental gene expression may be informative. Independent of the hippocampus, there has been some success in identifying genetic correlates of the specialized migratory, but not navigational, behavior of birds and electroreception in elasmobranchs; findings that have some implication for understanding genetic influences on varying spatial abilities. Nonetheless, these examples are remote from cognition and one has to wonder if the search for genetic correlates of varying spatial cognitive abilities in animals can overcome experimental obstacles, not the least of which is obtaining the sufficiently large subject pools needed to detect the certain small effect sizes of single genes.
