Measuring variation in cognition can be done, but it requires hard empirical work: a comment on Rowe and Healy
Rowe and Healy (2014) provide an interesting review of the potential pitfalls associated with the study of animal cognition from a behavioral ecology perspective. Their review is peppered with intriguing hypothetical examples of how studies of cognition can generate results that should be interpreted with caution. Apart from flagging up the importance of designing cognitive experiments that limit biases, something that is important for all experimental research, Rowe and Healy are very open in admitting that they cannot provide any cure to the problems with measuring variation in cognition. Inspired by Rowe and Healy, I argue that there is, if not a cure, at least a “band aid” that can be used to achieve better understanding of how cognitive ability evolves. Unfortunately for us that study these questions empirically, this “band aid” is hard work. I target 2 aspects that this necessary hard work should focus on: 1) designing cognitive tests that are of ecological relevance and 2) broadening the taxonomic scope in the study of cognition. For the first point, a recent article in Behavioral Ecology by Thornton et al. (2014) summarizes how we can use cognitive tests based on ideas from psychology and place these in an ecological context to investigate how cognition can evolve. In fact, placing tests of cognition in an ecologically relevant framework is a direction that our colleagues in psychology have been advocating