Cognition and Its Shaping Effect on Sexual Conflict: Integrating Biology and Psychology

Abstract

While genetic variation is of crucial importance for organisms to be able to adapt to their ever-changing environments over generations, cognitive processes can serve the same purpose by acting at shorter time scales. Cognition, and its resulting behaviour, allows animals to display flexible, fast and reversible responses that, without implying a genetic change, are crucial for adaptation and survival. In the research field on sexual conflict, where studies focus on male and female mating strategies that increase the individual’s reproductive fitness while forcing a cost on the partner, the role that cognition may play in how such strategies can be optimised has been widely overlooked. However, a careful analysis of behavioural studies shows that animals can develop and change their responses depending on what they perceive as well as on what they can predict from their experience, which can be of prime importance for optimising their reproductive fitness. As will be reviewed here, largely psychological processes, such as perception, memory, learning and decision-making, can not only modulate sexual conflict, but can also have a big impact on the reproductive success of a given individual. This review highlights the need for a more integrative view of sexual conflict where cognitive processes are also considered as a fundamental part of an animal’s adaptive mating response.

The genome of the simultaneously hermaphroditic snail Lymnaea stagnalis reveals an evolutionary expansion of FMRFamide-like receptors

“…As a simultaneous hermaphrodite, these snails can mate in the male and female role, but within a single mating interaction one individual must choose which role to perform; roles can subsequently be immediately swapped with the same or a different partner 47 . The particulars of this behaviour allow for experimentally disentangling male and female processes and underlying motivations [48][49][50][51] , something that is di cult to do in many other hermaphroditic species 52,53 . As a result, the great pond snail has played a central role in driving evolutionary research on hermaphroditic reproductive processes including sel ng, mate choice, sexual con ict, and sperm competition [54][55][56][57][58][59] .…”