Dovid Kozlovsky

• BS in Biology, Psychology and Animal Behavior
• PostDoc Position at Kennesaw State University

Reproductive aging in vertebrates is commonly characterized by an increase in reproductive performance early in life and a decline in reproductive performance late in life (i.e. senescence). However, some species do not seem to exhibit reproductive senescence, and others even exhibit increased reproductive performance throughout their lifetimes. Ou...

Animals use climate-related environmental cues to fine-tune breeding timing and investment to match peak food availability. In birds, spring temperature is a commonly documented cue used to initiate breeding, but with global climate change, organisms are experiencing both directional changes in ambient temperatures and extreme year-to-year precipit...

Supplemental feeding of wild animal populations is popular across many areas of the world and has long been considered beneficial, especially to avian taxa. Over four billion dollars are spent by hobby bird feeders in the United States each year alone. However, there is mixed evidence whether wildlife feeding is beneficial, including when it is imp...

Central place foraging field crickets are an ideal system for studying the adaptive value of learning and memory, but more research is needed on ecologically relevant cognition in these invertebrates. Here, we test the visuospatial place learning of Texas field crickets (Gryllus texensis) in a radial arm maze. Our study expands previous work on G....

In socially monogamous animals, maintaining stable mating pairs across years has been hypothesized to result in increased reproductive success. However, previous individual breeding experience may independently affect reproductive success, regardless of pair stability. We examined associations between pair composition based on previous breeding exp...

Urbanization has a tremendous impact on the environment from landscape features to distribution of food resources. Such drastic environmental changes can result in community, population, and individual differences between urban and non-urban animals. Urbanization has been associated with differential mortality and reproduction and therefore, differ...

General intelligence has been a topic of high interest for over a century. Traditionally, research on general intelligence was based on principal component analyses and other dimensionality reduction approaches. The advent of high-speed computing has provided alternative statistical tools that have been used to test predictions of human general int...

The greater male variability phenomenon predicts that males exhibit larger ranges of variation in cognitive performance compared with females; however, support for this pattern has come exclusively from studies of humans and lacks mechanistic explanation. Furthermore, the vast majority of the literature assessing sex differences in cognition is bas...

Animals inhabiting montane gradients experience varying winter climates that may result in differential selection on survival-related traits. Higher elevations in temperate climates are characterized by harsher winters with greater and longer-lasting snow cover compared to lower elevations, potentially leading to stronger selection for traits that...

How environmental variation affects the strength of selection is important for understanding phenotypic variation within a population. An indirect method to evaluate differences in selection pressures is to compare the age composition of a breeding population. A larger adult/first-year breeding ratio, due to higher juvenile mortality, may indicate...

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has been broadly applied in the biological sciences to yield new insights into behavior, cognition, population biology, and distributions. RFID systems entail wireless communication between small tags that, when stimulated by an appropriate radio frequency transmission, emit a weak, short-range wirel...

Understanding the evolution of inter and intraspecific variation in cognitive abilities is one of the main goals in cognitive ecology. In scatter‐caching species, spatial memory is critical for the recovery of food caches and overwinter survival, but its effects on reproduction are less clear. Better spatial cognition may improve pre‐breeding condi...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1098/rsos.171604.].

Mounting evidence suggests that we are experiencing rapidly accelerating global climate change. Understanding how climate change may affect life is critical to identifying species and populations that are vulnerable. Most current research focuses on investigating how organisms may respond to gradual warming, but another effect of climate change is...

Cognitive flexibility allows animals to readily acquire new information even when learning contingencies may rapidly change, as is the case in highly variable, but predictable, environments. While cognitive flexibility is broadly thought to be beneficial, animals exhibit inter- and intraspecific variation, with higher levels of flexibility associat...

RFID spatial memory wild birds Understanding both inter-and intraspecific variation in animals' cognitive abilities is one of the central goals of cognitive ecology. We developed a field system for testing spatial learning in wild chickadees using radio frequency identification (RFID)-enabled feeders that allowed us to track individuals across mult...

Anthropogenic environments are a dominant feature of the modern world; therefore, understanding which traits allow animals to succeed in these urban environments is especially important. Overall, generalist species are thought to be most successful in urban environments, with better general cognition and less neophobia as suggested critical traits....

Montane habitats are characterized by predictably rapid heterogeneity along elevational gradients and are useful for investigating the consequences of environmental heterogeneity for local adaptation and population genetic structure. Food-caching mountain chickadees inhabit a continuous elevation gradient in the Sierra Nevada, and birds living at h...

Cognition is one of the mechanisms underlying behavioural flexibility, but flexibility of cognition itself may vary as a result of trade-offs between the ability to learn new information and the ability to retain old memories. How and when cognitive flexibility is constrained by this trade-off remains poorly understood. We investigated cognitive fl...

There is little work investigating the relationship between environmental changes and associated hippocampal effects on animal homing. We took advantage of previous studies in which wild, non-migratory mountain chickadees spent six months in captivity prior to being released. Over the following three years, 45.8% of the birds were resighted, and in...

Synopsis Harsh environments and severe winters have been hypothesized to favor improvement of the cognitive abilities necessary for successful foraging. Geographic variation in winter climate, then, is likely associated with differences in selection pressures on cognitive ability, which could lead to evolutionary changes in cognition and its neural...

A critical question in the study of the evolution of cognition and the brain concerns the extent to which variation in cognitive processes and associated neural mechanisms is adaptive and shaped by natural selection. In order to be available to selection, cognitive traits and their neural architecture must show heritable variation within a populati...

Harsh environments and severe winters have been hypothesized to favor improvement of the cognitive abilities necessary for successful foraging. Geographic variation in winter climate, then, is likely associated with differences in selection pressures on cognitive ability, which could lead to evolutionary changes in cognition and its neural mechanis...

Breeding animals must balance their current reproductive effort with potential costs to their own survival and consequently to future reproduction. Life-history theory predicts that variation in reproductive investment should be based on fecundity and life expectancy with longer-lived species favoring their own survival over parental investment. Re...

Animals inhabiting challenging and harsh environments are expected to benefit from certain phenotypic traits including cognitive abilities. In particular, innovation and habituation are traits thought to benefit animals in challenging environments and increase individual’s probability of survival via increased foraging success. Here, we tested whet...

Behavioural syndrome literature suggests that behavioural traits may be coupled to form behavioural strategies that are consistent and repeatable across contexts. Typically these behavioural types are composed of bold, aggressive, dominant individuals and shy, less aggressive, subordinate individuals. Mountain chickadees living in varying climatic...

Heterogeneous environments are often associated with differential selection pressures favouring the evolution of local adaptations, and assortative mating is one of the mechanisms that might enhance such local adaptations. Montane environments present an example in which environment changes rapidly and predictably along an elevation gradient, and s...

For food-caching animals inhabiting environments with strong seasonal variation, harsh winter conditions may limit access to naturally available food and favour the evolution of enhanced spatial memory. Spatial memory enables animals to remember the locations of food caches for overwinter survival, therefore animals in harsher conditions may benefi...

Harsh and unpredictable environments have been assumed to favor the evolution of better learning abilities in animals. At the same time, individual variation in learning abilities might be associated with variation in other correlated traits potentially forming a behavioral syndrome. We have previously reported significant elevation-related differe...

The factors leading to the evolution of large brain size remain controversial. Brains are metabolically expensive and larger brains demand higher maintenance costs. The expensive-tissue hypothesis suggests that when selection favors larger brains, evolutionary changes in brain size can occur without an overall increase in energetic costs when brain...

Females in many bird species reportedly begin incubation prior to clutch completion, but the nature of such incubation and the degree to which it varies among females remains undescribed for almost all species. We used continuous recording of nest-cup temperatures to document incubation effort during egg laying at 57 Mountain Bluebird (Sialia curru...