Meeting Abstract
In the 1960’s, MacLean’s concept of the triune brain and its coevolution with cognitive abilities embedded itself into the fabric of psychology and the minds of the general public. For decades, it was assumed that reptiles possessed little to no complex cognitive abilities, with a brain that subserved basic survival functions. While the triune brain model has since been discredited, the bias has been subtly perpetuated, despite reptiles engaging in a diverse repertoire of behaviors including extraordinary navigational feats, social learning, and higher cognitive learning abilities. To determine if these behaviors are indeed cognitively-based requires an ecologically-relevant testing paradigm; correlating these behaviors with the neural architecture typically associated with cognitive abilities lends further support that these behaviors have a cognitive basis. In fact, recent studies have demonstrated that many of the reptilian behaviors that appear to require complex cognitive abilities are associated with areas of the brain that are homologous to those underlying complex cognitive processing in mammals (e.g., the hippocampus). Thus, reptiles represent a relatively understudied yet evolutionarily important group in comparative cognition. Examining the cognitive basis of reptilian behaviors as well as the neural underpinnings underlying those behaviors illuminates the evolutionary trajectory of cognition and the functional and structural similarities and dissimilarities between the reptilian and mammalian brain.
