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The society you live in can shape the complexity of your brain—and it does so differently for social insects than for humans and other vertebrate animals. A new comparative study of social and solitary wasp species suggests that as social behavior evolved, the brain regions for central cognitive processing in social insect species shrank.
This is the opposite of the pattern of brain increases with sociality that has been documented for several kinds of vertebrate animals including mammals, birds and fish. Compared to social species, the researchers found solitary species had significantly larger brain parts, known as the mushroom bodies, which are used for multisensory integration, associative learning and spatial memory—the best available measure of complex cognition in these insects. The finding supports the idea that as insect social behavior evolved, the need for such complex cognition in individuals actually decreased.Image credit: Sean O'Donnell, Drexel University
