Intriguing idea. From
The shift to life on land selected for planning by Ugurcan Mugan and Malcolm A. MacIver. From the Abstract:
It is uncontroversial that land animals have developed more elaborated cognitive abilities than aquatic animals, with the possible exception of formerly land-based mammals like whales and dolphins that have returned to an aquatic existence. Yet there is no apparent a-priori reason for aquatic and land animals to have different evolutionary capacities for the rise of cognition. One possibility is that investigators have been anthropocentric in their definition of cognition, rather than attuned to cognitive phenomena as appropriate to the broader ethological and ecological context of each species. However, this concern may not apply to the paradigmatically cognitive faculty of being able to imagine multiple complete sequences of actions to accomplish a goal and select one to enact, or planning. Although planning over space requires cognitive maps—which exist in many species including fish—behavioral and neural evidence for planning is presently restricted to birds and mammals. Here, we present evidence that a reason for the absence of planning in fish and many other aquatic animals is that in a key driver of natural selection, predator-prey interactions, there is no benefit to planning above habit-based action selection. In contrast, there is a significant benefit of planning under similar predator-prey scenarios for terrestrial conditions. This effect is dependent on a combination of increased visual range and the spatial complexity of terrestrial environments. The ability to plan in select terrestrial vertebrates may therefore be an adaptive response to the massive increase in visual sensory range (100x) occurring with the shift to life on land in combination with the complexity of terrestrial habitats and its affordance of strategic behavior during predator-prey interactions.
It would seem that there are some corollary ideas of what might drive cognitive development.
Predator-prey - The more intense the competition for survival, the greater the pressure on cognitive evolution.
Resource risk - The greater the uncertainty of access to necessary resources, the greater the pressure on cognitive development.
Sensory extension - The more remote your sensory capacity (acuity of eyesight, sense of smell, hearing, etc.) the greater the spatial realm in which you operate and therefore the wider the number of possible future scenarios necessary to be planned for.
Conextual dynamism - The faster the evolution of your context, the greater the pressure on cognitive development.
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