Vladimir V Pravosudov

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Nevada, Reno

Environmental drivers of within-population reproductive patterns are often hypothesized to lead to reproductive strategies tuned to local conditions. Organisms adjust energy allocation between survival and reproduction based on experience, age, lifespan and resource availability. Variation in these energetic investments can be described as differen...

Many animals disperse from their natal sites as juveniles to settle in new locations where they may eventually breed. Estimating distances of such postnatal dispersal within and across populations, as well as identifying factors affecting recruitment success, is important for understanding the evolutionary consequences of dispersal. We investigated...

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...

Cognitive abilities are hypothesized to affect survival and life span in nonhuman animals. However, most tests of this hypothesis have relied on interspecific comparisons of indirect measures of cognitive ability, such as brain size. We present direct evidence that individual variation in cognitive abilities is associated with differences in life s...

Wild populations appear to synchronize their reproductive phenology based on numerous environmental and ecological factors; yet, there is still individual variation in the timing of reproduction within populations and such variation may be associated with fitness consequences. For example, many studies have documented a seasonal decline in reproduc...

Phenotypic variation may influence social structure if animals associate nonrandomly based on phenotypic traits. For animals that rely on cognition for survival, variation in cognitive ability may also affect social structure. Individuals with worse cognitive abilities could benefit from preferentially associating with conspecifics with better cogn...

Many organisms engage in metabolic tradeoffs to manage costs associated with reproductive output which often leads to these costs carrying over into the future. Compensatory mechanisms vary across life history strategies and are expected to result in near-optimal fitness gains for the investor. Here we investigated whether environmental differences...

A recent paper Smulders et al., (2023) analyzed results of an experiment in which food-caching coal tits needed to relocate and recover multiple previously made food caches and argued that food caching parids use familiarity and not recollection memory when recovering food caches. The memory task involving recovery of multiple caches in the same tr...

While researchers have investigated mating decisions for decades, gaps remain in our understanding of how behaviour influences social mate choice. We compared spatial cognitive performance and food caching propensity within social pairs of mountain chickadees inhabiting differentially harsh winter climates to understand how these measures contribut...

Social animals may use alternative strategies when foraging, with producer–scrounger being one stable dichotomy of strategies. While ‘producers’ search and discover new food sources, ‘scroungers’ obtain food discovered by producers. Previous work suggests that differences in cognitive abilities may influence tendencies toward being either a produce...

The use of abstract rules in behavioral decisions is considered evidence of executive functions associated with higher-level cognition. Laboratory studies across taxa have shown that animals may be capable of learning abstract concepts, such as the relationships between items, but often use simpler cognitive abilities to solve tasks. Little is know...

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...

Environmental variability favours the evolution of learning and memory, influencing not only basic associative learning processes but also more advanced cognitive abilities associated with cognitive flexibility. When environmental conditions change repeatedly and predictably, the ability to learn related patterns and anticipate future changes can b...

Animals frequently encounter situations in which they can choose to move either left or right. Consistent preferences to move a specific direction may be associated with lateralization, or the asymmetric structure and function of the brain and nervous system. Other lateralized behaviors commonly occur across taxa, possibly reflecting a selective ad...

While many animals utilize socially transmitted information, there is still much to understand about how individuals form social networks and how these networks influence social information use. Here, we tested the hypothesis that food distribution and availability can influence social structure and social information transfer when discovering nove...

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...

Laboratory studies show that increased physiological burden during development results in cognitive impairment. In the wild, animals experience a wide range of developmental conditions, and it is critical to understand how variation in such conditions affects cognitive abilities later in life, especially in species that strongly depend on such abil...

Vocal communication is used across taxa to convey a range of information. One of the most well-studied vocal behaviors is the song of temperate passerine birds. Among individuals, male song differs across numerous acoustic parameters, many of which are used by females to assess male quality. Males in better condition often produce higher song outpu...

Traditionally, investigations of cognition have been carried out in laboratory conditions, but such conditions provide unnatural and frequently stressful environments for wild-caught animals. Taking the study of cognitive ecology into the wild allows directly assessing animals’ abilities in their natural environment and investigate the fitness cons...

The underlying mechanisms connecting correlated behaviors in wild populations remain largely unknown. Food-caching behavior is a prime example of an adaptive, compulsive-like behavior with a strong underlying innate drive—it starts after early development and is critical for survival—and individuals of some species rigorously and continuously cache...

Traditionally, exploration and exploitation of resources have been viewed as mutually exclusive behaviours in which animals can either allocate time to gathering information or to using known resources. But these behaviours can also be viewed as opposite ends of a continuum, with intermediate behaviours that balance exploration and exploitation, su...

Social dominance has long been used as a model to investigate social stress. However, many studies using such comparisons have been performed in captive environments. These environments may produce unnaturally high antagonistic interactions, exaggerating the stress of social subordination and any associated adverse consequences. One such adverse ef...

Spatial cognition is used by most organisms to navigate their environment. Some species rely particularly heavily on specialized spatial cognition to survive, suggesting that a heritable component of cognition may be under natural selection. This idea remains largely untested outside of humans, perhaps because cognition in general is known to be st...

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...

Social learning is a primary mechanism for information acquisition in social species. Despite many benefits, social learning may be disadvantageous when independent learning is more efficient. For example, searching independently may be more advantageous when food sources are ephemeral and unpredictable. Individual differences in cognitive abilitie...

Senescence, the gradual reduction and loss of function as organisms age, is a widespread process that is especially pronounced in cognitive abilities. Senescence appears to have a genetic basis and can be affected by evolutionary processes. If cognitive senescence is shaped by natural selection, it may be linked with selection on cognitive abilitie...

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...

Nest construction is a widespread behaviour that is a critical fitness investment in many taxa. Nests provide stable environments for offspring production, development and at times adult survival. Avian nest structure and composition has been linked to insulative properties and the reduction of energetic requirements for incubating females. However...

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...

Heterogeneous environments can create differential selection pressures among populations, which may result in the evolution of local adaptations. Premating isolation mechanisms may emerge due to limited movement among locally adapted individuals, thus further enhancing such adaptations. The song of male songbirds is one potential premating isolatio...

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...

Understanding how differences in cognition evolve is one of the critical goals in cognitive ecology [1-5]. In food-caching species that rely on memory to recover caches, enhanced spatial cognition has been hypothesized to evolve via natural selection [2, 6-8], but there has been no direct evidence of natural selection acting on spatial memory. Food...

Small birds overwintering in cold climates must meet the daily challenge of accumulating sufficient energy reserves throughout the day to ensure overnight survival. Theoretical work suggests that risk of starvation is a major force shaping optimal daily foraging routines. Animals are predicted to adjust how they distribute their daily foraging acti...

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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...

Variation in an animal's spatial environment can induce variation in the hippocampus, an area of the brain involved in spatial cognitive processing. Specifically, increased spatial area use is correlated with increased hippocampal attributes, such as volume and neurogenesis. In the side-blotched lizard (Uta stansburiana), males demonstrate alternat...

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...

Behaviours such as territoriality, navigation and acquisition of food resources depend on spatially based cognition, which has been positively associated with the hippocampus, the area of the brain responsible for spatial processing. We previously demonstrated that differential demands on spatial processing within the context of territoriality affe...

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...

Song in temperate songbirds is typically learned from local males and commonly thought to function in mate choice and male–male competition. Because male song is learned locally and is phenotypically plastic, it often varies geographically and may serve as a cue for an individual's location of origin. In montane environments, environmental heteroge...

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...

Song in songbirds is widely thought to function in mate choice and male–male competition. Song is also phenotypically plastic and typically learned from local adults; therefore, it varies across geographical space and can serve as a cue for an individual's location of origin, with females commonly preferring males from their respective location. Ge...

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...

Differential demands on cognitive ability may be expected to result in the evolution of cognition and associated changes in underlying neural mechanisms. While most comparative studies of cognition have focused on volumetric brain measurements, it remains unclear whether neuron morphology, which appears to be directly linked to cognitive functions,...

Many animals cache food when it is abundant and later rely in part on spatial memory to retrieve those caches. The importance of memory for cache recovery and fitness in food-caching species has been hypothesized to result in selection favoring enhanced spatial memory and an enlarged hippocampus, an area of the brain involved in spatial memory. Thi...

Variation in environmental conditions associated with differential selection on spatial memory has been hypothesized to result in evolutionary changes in the morphology of the hippocampus, a brain region involved in spatial memory. At the same time, it is well known that the morphology of the hippocampus might also be directly affected by environme...

Differences in an animal's spatial environment can have dramatic effects on the hippocampus, an area of the brain involved with spatial processing. Animals in spatially impoverished environments have decreased hippocampal attributes. However, we do not know if differences in the spatial environment differentially interact with territorial status, w...

Enhancements to memory are associated with enhanced neural structures that support those capabilities. A great deal of work has examined this relationship in the context of natural variation in spatial memory capability and hippocampal structure (hereafter Hp). Most studies have focused on volumetric and neuron measures, but have seldom examined th...

Across taxa, both neural growth and cognitive function show considerable developmental plasticity. Data from studies of decision making, learning, and discrimination demonstrate that early life conditions have an impact on subsequent neural growth, maintenance, and cognition, with important ecological and evolutionary implications. Here, we provide...

There is significant and often heritable variation in cognition and its underlying neural mechanisms, yet specific genetic contributions to such variation are not well characterized. Black-capped chickadees present a good model to investigate the genetic basis of cognition because they exhibit tremendous climate-related variation in memory, hippoca...

In many animals, behaviours such as territoriality, mate guarding, navigation and food acquisition rely heavily on spatial memory abilities; this has been demonstrated in diverse taxa, from invertebrates to mammals. However, spatial memory ability in squamate reptiles has been seen as possible, at best, or non-existent, at worst. Of the few previou...

Food-caching birds rely on stored food to survive the winter, and spatial memory has been shown to be critical in successful cache recovery. Both spatial memory and the hippocampus, an area of the brain involved in spatial memory, exhibit significant geographic variation linked to climate-based environmental harshness and the potential reliance on...

Harsh environments may lead to increased demands on memory in animals that rely on memory for survival. We previously showed that winter severity is associated with non-experience-based differences in memory and the hippocampus over a large continental scale in food-caching black-capped chickadees, Poecile atricapillus. However, large climatic diff...

In environments where resources are difficult to obtain and enhanced cognitive capabilities might be adaptive, brain structures associated with cognitive traits may also be enhanced. In our previous studies, we documented a clear and significant relationship among environmental conditions, memory and hippocampal structure using ten populations of b...

During the last few decades, evidence has demonstrated that adult neurogenesis is a well-preserved feature throughout the animal kingdom. In birds, ongoing neuronal addition occurs rather broadly, to a number of brain regions. This review describes adult avian neurogenesis and neuronal recruitment, discusses factors that regulate these processes, a...

Many animals use spatial memory. Although much work has examined the accuracy of spatial memory, few studies have explicitly focused on its longevity. The importance of long-term spatial memory for foraging has been demonstrated in several cases. However, the importance of such long-term memory for all animals is unclear. In this study, we present...

Selection for enhanced cognitive traits is hypothesized to produce enhancements to brain structures that support those traits. Although numerous studies suggest that this pattern is robust, there are several mechanisms that may produce this association. First, cognitive traits and their neural underpinnings may be fixed as a result of differential...

Harsh environmental conditions may produce strong selection pressure on traits, such as memory, that may enhance fitness. Enhanced memory may be crucial for survival in animals that use memory to find food and, thus, particularly important in environments where food sources may be unpredictable. For example, animals that cache and later retrieve th...

Environmental conditions may create increased demands for memory, which in turn may affect specific brain regions responsible for memory function. This may occur either via phenotypic plasticity or selection for individuals with enhanced cognitive abilities. For food-caching animals, in particular, spatial memory appears to be important because it...

Vladimir V. Pravosudov obtained master’s degree in zoology studying food-caching behavior in parids at the University of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in Russia in 1983. From 1983 to 1990, he worked at the Institute of the Biological Problems of the North (Russian Academy of Sciences) studying ecology of resident passerine birds. In 1991, he start...

The transition from wakefulness to sleep is marked by pronounced changes in brain activity. The brain rhythms that characterize the two main types of mammalian sleep, slow-wave sleep (SWS) and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, are thought to be involved in the functions of sleep. In particular, recent theories suggest that the synchronous slow-oscill...

Many food-caching animals live in groups and cache pilferage may be one of the negative consequences of social living. Several hypotheses have been proposed to suggest that individuals may benefit from caching even when cache pilferage is high if all individuals can cache and pilfer equally. Stable groups may hypothetically support the evolution of...

It has been hypothesized that individuals who have higher demands for spatially based behaviours should show increases in hippocampal attributes. Some avian species have been shown to use a spatially based representation of their environment during migration. Further, differences in hippocampal attributes have been shown between migratory and non-m...

Previous studies have suggested that the ability to inhabit harsh environments may be linked to advanced learning traits. However, it is not clear if individuals express such traits as a consequence of experiencing challenging environments or if these traits are inherited. To assess the influence of differential selection pressures on variation in...

Brain plasticity and adult neurogenesis may play a role in many ecologically important processes including mate recognition, song learning and production, and spatial memory processing. In a number of species, both physical and social environments appear to influence attributes (e.g., volume, neuron number, and neurogenesis) of particular brain reg...

Many animals regularly hoard food for future use, which appears to be an important adaptation to a seasonally and/or unpredictably changing environment. This food-hoarding paradigm is an excellent example of a natural system that has broadly influenced both theoretical and empirical work in the field of biology. The food-hoarding paradigm has playe...

A well-developed spatial memory is important for many animals, but appears especially important for scatter-hoarding species. Consequently, the scatter-hoarding system provides an excellent paradigm in which to study the integrative aspects of memory use within an ecological and evolutionary framework. One of the main tenets of this paradigm is tha...

All animals in which sleep has been studied express signs of sleep-like behaviour, suggesting that sleep must have some fundamental functions that are sustained by natural selection. Those functions, however, are still not clear. Here, we examine the ecological relevance of sleep from the perspective of behavioural trade-offs that might affect fitn...

The adult hippocampus in birds and mammals undergoes neurogenesis and the resulting new neurons appear to integrate structurally and functionally into the existing neural architecture. However, the factors underlying the regulation of new neuron production is still under scrutiny. In recent years, the concept that spatial memory affects adult hippo...

This chapter explains the effects of nutritional stress during development, with a focus on the hippocampus and spatial memory. Research work done on spatial memory in birds has provided a clear link between the ecological need to store food, a relatively enhanced spatial memory used to retrieve the cached food, and the relative volume of the hippo...

When correlating behavior with particular brain regions thought responsible for the behavior, a different region of the brain is usually measured as a control region. This technique is often used to relate spatial processes with the hippocampus, while concomitantly controlling for overall brain changes by measuring the remainder of the telencephalo...