The Innovative Brain

Abstract

Not least because humans are inveterate inventors, innovation is considered to be a reason that other animals have big brains. The Innovative Brain Hypothesis really came into being when Lefebvre et al. suggested that innovation could be a way to assess cognitive abilities in wild animals, which tend not to be amenable to cognitive testing in the traditional, laboratory context. The collection of a data set of foraging innovations in birds (and a similar data set later collected for primates) has provided opportunities to test the main hypothesis in this chapter. Innovations were later divided into technical and non-technical innovations, with the former perhaps leading to more correlations with brain size than the latter. I conclude that this is a very appealing hypothesis but that the evidence is not especially persuasive.