Ella F. Cole

TL;DR: The results provide strong evidence that songbirds follow alternative social strategies related to personality, which has implications not only for the causes of social network structure but also for the strength and direction of selection on personality in natural populations.

TL;DR: Novel problem-solving performance in 468 wild great tits Parus major temporarily taken into captivity and subsequently followed up their reproductive performance in the wild was assessed, consistent with the idea that variation in cognitive ability is shaped by contrasting effects on different life history traits directly linked to fitness.

TL;DR: The evolutionary ecology of cognition in wild populations is a rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field providing many opportunities for advancing the understanding of how cognitive abilities have evolved, and how an evolutionary ecological framework, more generally, along with innovative technologies has the potential to revolutionise the study of Cognition in the wild.

TL;DR: The hypothesis that individual variation in competitive ability can be explained by alternative behavioural strategies can be supported by a study of great tits.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors conducted standardized assays on a natural population of great tits, Parus major, to quantify and characterize individual variation in problem-solving performance, a simple cognitive trait often linked to innovative foraging ability.