Social Cognition LabLinks

No animal is an island, entire of itself. With the exception of the last living dodo, any animal lives in a world where there are others like itself — members of its own species, with which it might cooperate or compete, and the only group from which it can find an effective breeding partner. Conspecifics are a distinct and important part of an animal’s environment, even if it is not a member of a notably social species. So important that specific cognitive mechanisms have evolved for interacting with others of the same species — for recognising them, communicating with them, learning from them, understanding what they are up to... These mechanisms are the subject of the burgeoning field of social cognition, the focus of a CellPress ‘LabLinks’ meeting held at Birkbeck College on 3rd December 2010, arranged by Stavroula Kousta (Trends in Cognitive Sciences), Meredith LeMasurier (Neuron) and me, with academic organizers Chris and Uta Frith (University College London). Social cognition is not confined to social animals, but one reason why many are so fascinated by it is the observation that, among vertebrates at least, those species with particularly large brains (for their size) are often the more social members of a group — for example, anthropoid primates, corvids or cetaceans. This led to the ‘social brain hypothesis’, which speculates that an important factor in the evolution of large brains was their requirement to deal with the complexities of life in a group. At the meeting, Lars Chittka (Queen Mary University of London) pointed out that this seeming correlation is far from true in the insects, where eusocial species can form social groups of staggering size. If you consider the ‘mushroom bodies’, parts of the insect brain implicated in learning and memory, variation in their size shows no clear relation to sociality. Indeed, the solitary ancestors of social bees and wasps grew larger mushroom bodies when they evolved a parasitoid lifestyle ~100 million years before becoming social — perhaps because of the cognitive demands of central place foraging, brood care, and prey identification. While one can argue that the large brains of some social mammals might reflect the particular complexity and subtlety of their interactions, the interactions between individuals in eusocial insect societies can also be quite sophisticated — for example, there is evidence for individual recognition, based on facial markings, that is important in the maintenance of dominance hierarchies in wasps. Anyone with a child, particularly a teenager, will be well aware of the way they readily pick up modes of speech and behaviour from their peers. Social learning is a powerful force, and Chittka pointed out that, again, it can be seen in insects, the example given being consensus building in swarming honeybees, where “scouts” return to the hive with information about potential new nest sites. A returned scout communicates information about possible new sites — and does so with an enthusiasm and determination that reflects its confidence that the site will be a good new home. The sum of the activities of all the returning scouts can be represented as a vector, which varies in length and direction over time, gradually building to a consensus on where to swarm to find the best available new nest site. Editorial