Investment in higher order central processing regions is not constrained by brain size in social insects.
نویسندگان
چکیده
The extent to which size constrains the evolution of brain organization and the genesis of complex behaviour is a central, unanswered question in evolutionary neuroscience. Advanced cognition has long been linked to the expansion of specific brain compartments, such as the neocortex in vertebrates and the mushroom bodies in insects. Scaling constraints that limit the size of these brain regions in small animals may therefore be particularly significant to behavioural evolution. Recent findings from studies of paper wasps suggest miniaturization constrains the size of central sensory processing brain centres (mushroom body calyces) in favour of peripheral, sensory input centres (antennal and optic lobes). We tested the generality of this hypothesis in diverse eusocial hymenopteran species (ants, bees and wasps) exhibiting striking variation in body size and thus brain size. Combining multiple neuroanatomical datasets from these three taxa, we found no universal size constraint on brain organization within or among species. In fact, small-bodied ants with miniscule brains had mushroom body calyces proportionally as large as or larger than those of wasps and bees with brains orders of magnitude larger. Our comparative analyses suggest that brain organization in ants is shaped more by natural selection imposed by visual demands than intrinsic design limitations.
منابع مشابه
Comparative analysis of constraints and caste differences in brain investment among social paper wasps.
We compared species mean data on the size of functionally distinct brain regions to test the relative rates at which investment in higher-order cognitive processing (mushroom body calyces) versus peripheral sensory processing (optic and antennal lobes) increased with increasing brain size. Subjects were eusocial paper wasps from queen and worker castes of 10 species from different genera. Relat...
متن کاملDistributed cognition and social brains: reductions in mushroom body investment accompanied the origins of sociality in wasps (Hymenoptera: Vespidae).
The social brain hypothesis assumes the evolution of social behaviour changes animals' ecological environments, and predicts evolutionary shifts in social structure will be associated with changes in brain investment. Most social brain models to date assume social behaviour imposes additional cognitive challenges to animals, favouring the evolution of increased brain investment. Here, we presen...
متن کاملSocial complexity influences brain investment and neural operation costs in ants.
The metabolic expense of producing and operating neural tissue required for adaptive behaviour is considered a significant selective force in brain evolution. In primates, brain size correlates positively with group size, presumably owing to the greater cognitive demands of complex social relationships in large societies. Social complexity in eusocial insects is also associated with large group...
متن کاملDeveloping a Semantic Similarity Judgment Test for Persian Action Verbs and Non-action Nouns in Patients With Brain Injury and Determining its Content Validity
Objective: Brain trauma evidences suggest that the two grammatical categories of noun and verb are processed in different regions of the brain due to differences in the complexity of grammatical and semantic information processing. Studies have shown that the verbs belonging to different semantic categories lead to neural activity in different areas of the brain, and action verb processing is r...
متن کاملORE extraction and blending optimization model in poly- metallic open PIT mines by chance constrained one-sided goal programming
Determination a sequence of extracting ore is one of the most important problems in mine annual production scheduling. Production scheduling affects mining performance especially in a poly-metallic open pit mine with considering the imposed operational and physical constraints mandated by high levels of reliability in relation to the obtained actual results. One of the important operational con...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
عنوان ژورنال:
- Proceedings. Biological sciences
دوره 281 1784 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2014