Big Brains and Changing Environments: Cause or Consequence?
Large brains are metabolically costly, and associations with changing environments do not imply they evolved there, as the Cognitive Buffer Hypothesis (CBH) would suggest. They may instead evolve in stable conditions and later facilitate colonization of changing environments. Using neuro-evolution in an artificial seasonal foraging task, we compared agents evolving exclusively in changing environments to agents first evolved in static environments before transitioning. Results show that larger neural networks in dynamic environments arise mainly from prior static evolution, achieving superior performance under unpredictable changes. Our results challenge strict CBH predictions, provide ag...
| Authors | Sian Heesom-Green, Jonathan Shock, Geoff Nitschke |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.NE |
| Published | 14 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 September 2026 |
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