Meeting Abstract
In the wild, particularly in rapidly changing conditions, being capable of solving new problems can increase chances of survival. In the context of climate change, innovativeness is therefore undeniably a crucial trait. In the past few decades, birds appeared to be a taxa of choice to study innovation, thanks to the abundant literature of avian innovation reports. Innovation rate databases in birds have been successfully employed to assess relations between innovativeness and other traits such as invasion success, fitness and brain size. In order to assess more direct causes of variation in innovation, another approach consists in experimentally measuring innovativeness in captive wild animals using problem-solving tasks that mimic wild innovations. This method can allow for finer scale evaluation of ecological and neural correlates of innovation. In my talk, I will present results that were obtained using the latter approach, both at the inter-individual and inter-specific levels. I will show that such data can be used to 1) assess relations between problem-solving and a variety of cognitive and personality traits, 2) compare experimental behavioral data with other known traits of interest such as innovation rate or fitness, and, even more interestingly, 3) investigate neurobiological properties underlying variation in problem-solving and other cognitive traits. During my talk, I will present past data as well as ongoing projects utilizing the comparative approach at a neurobiological level, using state-of-the art molecular methods to answer our research questions.
