UC Davis

Cognitive ecology investigates how interactions with the environment shape the cognitive abilities of organisms. Studies on humans have emphasized that cognition is selected for under specific environmental conditions to extract information efficiently. More recently this approach has been applied to animals and focuses on how variation within the environment shapes the evolution of cognitive systems. Animals may use certain behavioral styles or cognitive traits to adapt to the amount of variability and predictability in their environment. Variation in resources and environmental complexity are two major factors that drive the diversity of cognitive adaptations seen across animals, as these are often beneficial for specific conditions or allow for adjusting to novel or changing conditions. For example, animals who experience displacement due to rapid urbanization may benefit from enhanced cognitive abilities and/or behavioral flexibility to adjust to those environmental changes quickly.Combining cognitive and urban ecology is particularly interesting because animals often need to consider both predictable and unpredictable elements of human behavior to survive. While many animals can capitalize on the predictable elements of human behavior in the urban environment by avoiding direct interactions with humans, those who can capitalize on more unpredictable sources of variation, such as opportunistic provisioning, may gain an advantage in environments where this type of variation exists in substantial quantities. One way that animals may capitalize on these benefits is by exhibiting traits such as reduced neophobia, enhanced problem-solving abilities, and behavioral flexibility. These traits would allow them to access a wider variety of food resources available in urban spaces and may provide significant fitness advantages. This dissertation explores several aspects of behavioral flexibility ranging from specific, technical quantifications of an individual’s flexibility to solve foraging problems to more holistic or general strategies that individuals may adopt in foraging contexts. Combining experiments from the field and captivity, I explore how individuals innovate (i.e. solve a new problem or apply an old solution to a new problem) and whether they are flexible in their problem-solving behavior. For both the cognitive experiments and behavioral observations, I focused on two closely related species of macaques, rhesus (Macaca mulatta) and long-tailed (Macaca fascicularis). By combining these approaches, I explore both the proximate mechanisms of behavioral flexibility through induced innovation as well as the natural manifestations of flexibility in female foraging behavior. Together, these projects quantify inter-individual differences in foraging behavior and extractive foraging abilities, as well as the role of individual traits in those abilities. Further, these studies provide important insights on the differences in foraging strategies for individuals living in complex and uncertain environments. These insights may be important for understanding the effects of rapid human-induced environmental change and how animals cope with those changes through behavioral diversity and problem-solving.