Abstract
It is uncontroversial that land animals have more elaborated cognitive abilities than their aquatic counterparts such as fish. Yet there is no apparent a-priori reason for this. A key cognitive faculty is planning. We show that in visually guided predator-prey interactions, planning provides a significant advantage, but only on land. During animal evolution, the water-to-land transition resulted in a massive increase in visual range. Simulations of behavior identify a specific type of terrestrial habitat, clustered open and closed areas (savanna-like), where the advantage of planning peaks. Our computational experiments demonstrate how this patchy terrestrial structure, in combination with enhanced visual range, can reveal and hide agents as a function of their movement and create a selective benefit for imagining, evaluating, and selecting among possible future scenarios—in short, for planning. The vertebrate invasion of land may have been an important step in their cognitive evolution.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 3057 |
| Journal | Nature communications |
| Volume | 11 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 1 2020 |
Funding
We thank C. Mobley (Sequoia Scientific, Inc.,) for sharing data and conducting Hydrolight simulations for the clear water condition of Supplementary Fig. 1. We thank D. Dombeck, J. Krakauer, M. Gallio, L. Schmitz, and H. Davoudi for comments on earlier drafts. We thank G. Espinosa and A. Lai for creating the accompanying browser-based game. This work was funded by NSF Brain Initiative ECCS-1835389. Computing environment. The computational resources for this work were provided by the Quest high performance computing facility at Northwestern University which is jointly supported by the Office of the Provost, the Office for Research, and Northwestern University Information Technology. The cluster is composed of 244 nodes of Intel Haswell E5-2680 processors with 128 GB memory/ node, 184 nodes of Intel Xeon E5-2680 processors with 128 GB memory/node, 72 nodes of Intel Xeon Gold 6132 processors with 96 GB memory/node. Approximate runtimes: Simulation 1: 5,000 total compute hours (50 h on 100 Quest nodes); Simulation 2: 300,000 total compute hours (3000 h on 100 Quest nodes).
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Chemistry
- General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
- General Physics and Astronomy
