Causes and consequences of social cognition: from genes to fitness – SoCo

The social environment often has an important impact on fitness and generates a form of selection called ‘social selection’. Social selection should favor traits that make you succeed in social interactions throughout the year, yet such traits have received limited empirical attention. In particular, “social competence” describes the ability of an individual to adjust their behavior to each social situation, which should provide socially selected fitness benefits. Social competence relies on the availability and use of social information which should critically depend on cognitive abilities, yet research to date has largely focused on the behaviors themselves or the neurogenetic basis of these behaviors. The aim of this project is to measure both the causes and consequences of individual variation in cognitive abilities that should underlie social competence in great tits (Parus major). Specifically we will measure the genetic basis (causes) of variation in a number of cognitive abilities as well as the consequences of that variation for social competence and fitness thereby linking different levels of analysis from genes to cognition and social behavior to fitness. To achieve this ambitious goal, we have built a consortium that has complimentary expertise in the key components of this project (behavior, cognition, selection, genetics). We will use a combination of controlled experiments in aviaries, measures of cognition, behavior, and fitness in wild populations in contrasted ecological environments, and next-generation genetic sequencing with statistical tools recently developed by members of the team. Likewise, we have recently designed an automated “smart-feeder” for running cognitive tests on a large number of individuals either in the wild or in captivity which makes this project possible. Therefore members of the team have recently resolved technical barriers that prevented this ambitious project until now. We have organized our work across four major objectives: 1) measuring the link between social competence and cognition, 2) determining the influence of social ecology and habitat on cognition, 3) measuring the fitness impact of variation in cognition across contrasted environments, and 4) measuring the genetic basis of cognition and social competence to understand how selection might drive evolutionary change in cognitive abilities and social behavior. Each objective provides important advances for specific topics and together they will provide a major advance in our understanding of the causes and consequences of social competence and cognition in the wild.