Innovativeness as an emergent property: a new alignment of comparative and experimental research on animal innovation

Abstract

One contribution of 15 to a theme issue 'Innovation in animals and humans: understanding the origins and development of novel and creative behaviour'. Innovation and creativity are key defining features of human societies. As we face the global challenges of the twenty-first century, they are also facets upon which we must become increasingly reliant. But what makes Homo sapiens so innovative and where does our high innovation propensity come from? Comparative research on innovativeness in non-human animals allows us to peer back through evolutionary time and investigate the ecological factors that drove the evolution of innovativeness, whereas experimental research identifies and manipulates underpinning creative processes. In commenting on the present theme issue, I highlight the controversies that have typified this research field and show how a paradigmatic shift in our thinking about innovativeness will contribute to resolving these tensions. In the past decade, innovativeness has been considered by many as a trait, a direct product of cognition, and a direct target of selection. The evidence I review here suggests that innovativeness will be hereon viewed as one component, or even an emergent property of a larger array of traits, which have evolved to deal with environmental variation. I illustrate how research should capitalize on taxonomic diversity to unravel the full range of psychological processes that underpin innovativeness in non-human animals.

Problem-solving performance and reproductive success of great tits in urban and forest habitats

“…This result is in accordance with the cautionary views that single problem-solving tests cannot be assumed to measure an overall (or any) cognitive capacity without studying the underlying mechanisms (Rowe and Healy 2014; Thornton et al 2014;Griffin 2016;Reader et al 2016), and with other findings that problem-solving performance can vary across task types and contexts (reviewed by Thornton and Lukas 2012). In our study, the inconsistency between tasks could have arisen from motivational differences, i.e., solving the obstacle-removal task was imperative to provision the chicks, whereas solving the food-acquisition task merely offered extra food items.…”

Animal and human innovation: novel problems and novel solutions

“…A typical evoked-innovation study involves introducing a new problem to an individual, or, less often, to a group, allowing study of psychological processes, the adaptive consequences of innovation, and social transmission. The method also allows experimental manipulation of factors hypothesized to impact innovation, although this is still relatively uncommon in animal work at least [ 66 ]. In animal work and much research with children, the task often involves extraction of a reward from a puzzle.…”

“…[ 78 ] and commentaries thereon). Like studies of spontaneous innovation, there are measures to address such problems [ 79 ], and several additional measures are suggested in papers within this issue (see [ 18 , 37 , 66 , 80 ]). For example, presentation of a variety of tasks that differ in difficulty can ensure a reasonable number of solutions are observed and that the consistency of innovativeness across tasks and contexts is established.…”

“…Thus the term ‘innovation’ can carry an expectation of sophisticated cognitive processes. However, several authors in this issue, as well as elsewhere, note that simple cognitive processes as well as non-cognitive processes have been neglected as relevant in our understanding of innovation [ 18 , 48 , 66 , 78 , 109 , 110 ]. Here, we briefly review these disagreements and present our own view.…”

The Labile Limits of Forbidden Interactions

“…Animal innovations (i.e. animals behaving in an innovative way) have been described in a number of taxa, particularly in resourcepoor or novel environments [64]. For example, Laland & Reader [65] found that fooddeprived guppies (Poecilia reticulata) are more likely to develop foraging innovations than non-food-deprived individuals.…”