ABSTRACT
Cognitive ecology integrates knowledge on proximal causes of behaviour with ultimate explanations for the evolution and maintenance of variation in cognitive abilities. Cognitive ecology (also known as neuroecology) takes an evolutionary biology perspective on animal perception, learning, memory, decision-making and associated neural structures; related disciplines include comparative psychology and comparative neurobiology. Cognitive ecology encompasses approaches borrowed from evolutionary ecology, with the study of evolutionary causes (heritability, environment) and consequences (survival, reproduction) of individual variation in cognition and associated functional behaviour in the wild. Here, I briefly review the history of this emerging sub-discipline of animal cognition research, as well as some classic and contemporary studies, and make suggestions for future work aiming at uncovering links between the environment, cognition, and evolution.
