Niche Construction and Cognitive Evolution

Despite the fact that animal behavior involves a particularly powerful form of niche construction, few researchers have considered how the environmental impact of behavior may feed back to influence the evolution of the cognitive underpinnings of behavior. I explore a model that explicitly incorporates niche construction while tracking cognitive evolution. Agents and their stimuli are modeled as coevolving populations. The agents are born with “weights” attached to behaviors in a repertoire. Further, these agents are able to change these weights based on previous success and an inherited learning parameter. Both the agent and the stimulus receive payoffs through a behavioral interaction (where the payoff structure is influenced by the “genotype” of the stimulus). The behaving agent exhibits niche construction through its effects on stimuli (the “environment”), which can feed back to influence the value of different cognitive strategies. Here I focus on two forms of niche construction: (1) the stimulus and responding agent have common interests (positive niche construction) and (2) the stimulus and agent have dissimilar interests (negative niche construction). The form of niche construction qualitatively affects cognitive evolution (i.e., the initial behavioral probability distribution and the value of the learning parameter). Given a mutualism between the stimulus and responding agent, rapid learning and “fixed” behavioral distributions (i.e., most of the weight on a single behavior) evolve. Given an antagonism between the stimulus and agent, slower learning and “flexible” behavioral distributions (i.e., equal weight on different behaviors) evolve. I discuss these results in light of findings from the fields of ethology, psychology, and evolutionary ecology. © 2008, Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research.