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Saturday, June 23, 2018

Louis Lefebvre: Animal Innovation: From Ecology to Neurotransmitters (Friday, June 29, 2pm)

Louis Lefebvre:  
  (Friday, June 29, 2pm)


Some animals are opportunistic and respond to environmental change with flexible behaviour, while others are conservative and do not easily adapt to change. One way to operationalize this continuum is to quantify the number of novel foods and feeding techniques that animals use, corrected for all possible sources of bias. An integrative approach to this has several levels. First, it examines the phylogenetic distribution of the trait in as wide an array of animals as possible to assess the relative roles of common ancestry and independent convergent evolution. Second, it looks for all possible behavioral, ecological and life history correlates of this distribution to identify selective contexts, trade-offs and syndromes. Third, it identifies the neural mechanisms of innovation and its cognitive correlates at the level of brain area expansion, neuron numbers and neurotransmitter expression. Finally, ecologically relevant experimental proxies are validated to examine in the wild fitness differentials associated with innovative behavior.
Audet, J. N., Kayello, L., Ducatez, S., Perillo, S., Cauchard, L., Howard, J. T., ... & Lefebvre, L. (2018). Divergence in problem-solving skills is associated with differential expression of glutamate receptors in wild finchesScience Advances4(3), eaao6369.

Lefebvre, L., Reader, S. M., & Sol, D. (2004). Brains, innovations and evolution in birds and primatesBrain, Behavior and Evolution63(4), 233-246.

Louis Lefebvre (Speaker)
Professor McGill University



Michael Ryan (Moderator)
Professor University of Texas




17 comments:

  1. What if the difference between obstacle removal and reversal learning is just a simple matter of direct involvement of the birds in the first action? In fact, during the obstacle removal, the bird will associate its action to the signal, here the object. Therefore, we face a learning from classic conditionning. Whereas, during revearsal learning, the bird is facing the same object and has to discriminate the colors. In this case, there is absence of a prop, such as the lid of a box that could be removed. This makes it harder for some species of birds to learn the second problem. Couldn't this be considered as an error in a scientific method?

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  2. There is different results between birds and hyenas. But, can we compare those two animals? Actually, can we generalize the results for the birds to all animals in term on innovation? Species are so different that, what makes it possible to compare the bird to the chimpanzee to the hyenas to the homo erectus?

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  3. Thanks for this interesting talk!

    You didn't talk about the possibility of planning underneath the phenomenon of innovation. We had a presentation on it's role in evolution earlier this week by Malcom Maclver and to me, its presence (as a capacity) should correlate with innovation. However, according to your explanation (if I understood it correctly), it is the persistence in motordiversity, trying diverse things really fast that leads to innovation. Is planning "overrated" for such phenomenon? Is there different ways of speaking about it? Human innovation seem to imply a more reflexive activity, analysing and "planning" what could be the solution to a certain problem.

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    Replies
    1. Hi Frédérick, the idea seems appealing, but I'm a bit skeptical as to how on earth one would find a satisfying measure for "planning capacity" let alone finding a way to allow cross-species comparisons.

      Isn't this capacity, if it's at all measurable, bound to be heavily biased by the relative complexity of the immediate environment of each animal? I mean, just picture Prof Brosnan's captive monkey who have virtually unlimited food at their disposal. These folks, no matter how smart, have almost zero incentive to plan anything ahead (depriving them of food and asking them to work for it probably wouldn't pass an ethical committee hehe), even if they have this latent ability, why go through the trouble... so no such kind of solid experimental lab data to analyze for birds either I bet. Which to my knowledge leaves us with behavioral ethology, maybe? By the way, peut-être que je suis complètement dans le champ dans ce que je dis là, I am just as curious as you are. Anyway, do you have any suggestion for an objective measure of "planning capacity" that is compatible with Prof Lefebvre's methodology? :)

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  4. Je trouve très intéressant que cette méthode d’analyse puisse extraire plus de données à partir d’expérimentations déjà effectuées.

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  5. Thank you for sharing your work with us. I was interested in this idea of innovation in the light of another presenter we have had at the conference, Vladimir Pravosudov, who presented the idea for which he has evidential support that chickadees who are more flexible to change (as shown in reverse learning tests) may have less capacity for long term memory. So it seems as if there exists a trade off between flexibility and memory that I haven't heard mentioned by any of the other presenters, despite the fact that many of them mentioned reverse learning experiments. I was wondering, first of all, how closely innovation correlates with a bird's overall flexibility and the reverse learning metric, and whether you have observed this same trade off between increased flexibility and long term memory in any of your studies.

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  6. Very interesting parallels were drawn during this presentation between Corvids brain evolution and Humans brain evolution. Really appreciated the novelty of claiming that humans are not just “naked apes” but also “featherless crows”. This presentation was a great exemple of nuanced comparisons between non-human animals and humans cognitive abilities without making any evolutionary psychology just-so stories.

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  7. Je suis entièrement d’accord avec l’idée de bien opérationnaliser la cognition dans l’habitat naturelle de l’animal, surtout avec des données quantitatives afin d’être aussi objectif que possible. Je trouve cependant difficile de définir l’intelligence chez une espèce sans être influencé par notre définition de l’intelligence. Par exemple, nous avions un biais de penser que les primates étaient parmi les animaux les plus intelligents parce qu’ils nous ressemblent (un peu) et parce qu’ils semblent partager certaines de nos capacités cognitives (langue des signes (limité), intersubjectivité, etc.). Ce biais nous a fait sous-estimer l’intelligence de d’autres espèces animales. Je trouve très intéressant l’hypothèse d’intelligence indépendante de la branche phylogénétique : l’Humain (et les grands singes) ne serait pas intelligent uniquement à cause de son appartenance aux primates, mais à d’autres facteurs environnement qui se serait aussi produit chez d’autres espèces animales, entraînant aussi des différences cognitives entre les membres de cette espèce.

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  8. Putting here a question I already asked in person, for the sake of student evaluation (I think it was during that lecture that I asked it. In primatology taxonomy, we make a clear distinction between apes and monkeys, including in terms of cognition, brains structure, etc. Is there the same distinction in birds with various taxa. I think the answer was that crovids are considered like apes and others are monkeys, sort of.

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  9. On a tendance à mettre les primates dans une classe à part, probablement étant donné qu’ils nous “ressemblent” plus. Pourtant, la présentation de Louis Lefebvre nous a montré qu’en fait les oiseaux montrent des signes d’innovation dans leur habitat qui dépasse ce à quoi on pourrait s’attendre. Ils sont capables de résoudre des problèmes “d’obstacles” de manière brillante. La grosseur du cerveau et le nombre de neurones peuvent nous dire qu’elle est le niveau d’innovation que l’on trouvera chez différentes espèces, et cela peut également nous en apprendre sur l’être humain.

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  10. Considering that the ability to cope with novelty change over an individual lifetime, for instance, that flexibility decrease with aging, do you have any insight about change in GRIN2B/GRIN2A ratio over aging process?

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  11. Very, very interesting presentation! A question: Do you see some kind of link or influence between the urbanization of a species and the emergence of innovative behaviours in this one?

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  12. Merci pour la présentation, ce fut très intéressant! J’ai bien apprécié le fait que les animaux étaient observés dans leur habitat naturel ce qui, je crois, permet d’avoir une idée plus juste de leur comportement. De ce fait, je trouve fascinant de pouvoir constater l’effet que peut avoir l’environnement sur la cognition, e.g. les oiseaux en milieu urbain parviennent plus facilement que les oiseaux ruraux à résoudre des tâches demandant de déplacer un obstacle.

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  13. Une élève a posé une question pertinente durant la préentation, à savoir si l'équipe de M. Lefebvre avaient noté une différence dans les tests qu'ils ont conduits entre les mâles et les femelles. C'était quelque chose que je me demandais aussi, considérant le fait que les mâles et les femelles vont souvent avoir des rôles différents dans un groupe, une famille ou un milieu social dans les autres espèces. Donc, je me disais qu'en fonction du genre ils pourraient développer des habiletés différentes. Or, Louis a bien pris le temps de dire que lorsqu'ils n'avaient pas vu de différence, même lorsqu'ils en avaient cherché. Il a également spécifié que ses recherches n'étaient pas concentrées sur cela et que ce serait pertinent d'approfondir les études sur ce sujet.

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  14. Thank you for the presentation. You mentioned that in birds, the molecular phylogeny of the different species changed every five years. How could this be? How could the falcons, the eagles and the buzzards once be close on the phylogeny tree and are now distant? Can species of birds mate with other species to create this?

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  15. You mentioned that a very good generalist has more expression of glutamate receptors that promote neuronal plasticity, which helps memorize rapidly but does not facilitate long-term memory if the information is not used.

    - Is there a similar phenomenon in humans?

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