Symposium & Workshop: Thinking about change: an integrative approach for examining cognition in a changing world, SICB Annual Meeting, West Palm Beach, Florida, January 3-7, 2015

Franklin And Marshall College, Lancaster PA

Investigators

Abstract

This project will bring together a diverse group of scientists for a symposium at the 2015 annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in West Palm Beach, FL, January 3-7. The goal of the symposium is to understand the effects of global climate change on animal cognition. Traditional approaches for understanding how animals respond to climate change often focus on physiology; however, recent progress in the field demonstrates that behavior can provide a rapid and efficient response to such change. Thus, the participants of the symposium will integrate physiology, behavior, ecology, evolution, and psychology to understand the strategies that animals use to cope with change. By taking an integrative approach to cognition, the researchers will discuss methods to better predict the effect of climate change on a wider variety of species, thereby augmenting the scientific knowledgebase that resource managers and policy makers can utilize when making decisions in the context of climate change. In addition, this symposium will provide students and early-career faculty the opportunity to engage with scientists from a variety of different fields and career levels. Animals living in extreme environments have a suite of physiological adaptations to cope with their environmental conditions (e.g., thermal regime). However, many physiological attributes require evolutionary time to become expressed and, as a result, many studies focus on the consequences of possessing (or not) these physiological adaptations for the survival of a species in a given location. The research objectives of this symposium are to discuss and better understand 1) how animals use cognition to cope with rapid environmental change, 2) how these mechanisms "scale up" to affect ecological/evolutionary patterns, 3) how we might determine which features of the environment are most important for the evolution of cognition, and 4) which of these features may be critical for future investigations.