Simon Grendéus

Spatial learning and lateralization in lizards Abstract. Spatial memory is a fundamental cognitive process that allows animals to navigate and interact with their environment effectively. While extensiv

📣 I am excited to share some new collaborative work published in Biology Letter @royalsocietypublishing.org on spatial learning and lateralisation in lizards 🦎! Check out the full OA paper here:
doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...

#AnimalCognition #ThinkLikeALizard

Absolutely inspirational - work by Pamela Lyon ! 😎🔥

Looks super interesting, but I can't access it through my uni. Could you send me a copy please?

Learning with lacertids: Studying the link between ecology and cognition within a comparative framework Abstract. Cognition is an essential tool for animals to deal with environmental challenges. Nonetheless, the ecological forces driving the evolution of cog

Learning with lacertids: Studying the link between ecology and cognition within a comparative framework url: academic.oup.com/evolut/artic...

What if eye...? Computationally recreating vision evolution Recreating evolution by coevolving eyes and behaviors in embodied agents allows exploration of what-if questions in vision.

Dan-Eric Nilsson & his colleagues have created virtual animals with AI vision to study evolution in a new way—watching natural selection and adaptation unfold in real time inside simulated worlds. A powerful new tool for evolutionary biology. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

#evolution #AI #biology

Can also recommend, and there was a nice chapter-by-chapter reading club of it with Georg and lots of other great speakers - videos still up here:
sites.google.com/view/bbtread...

This book is a wonderful, synthetic and richly illustrated journey through the natural history of the vertebrate brain 🤩

A big thank you to the authors 🙏

"A major theme in the evolution of the telencephalon has been the emergence of novel pathways...

1/2

Highly recommended! I just finished a cover-to-cover read, and it's a great addition to the avian sensory ecology literature with excellent discussions of the links between brain & behavior. I prefer reading paper books (better retention) but the whole thing is freely downloadable! bit.ly/482xPZm 🦉🧠

A graph comparing the number of neurons in the telencephalon of reptiles, birds, and two estimates for T. rex. Even the lowest of these estimates suggests the telencephalic neuron count of T. rex to be similar to that of a pygmy falcon or blackbird - several times more than the largest telencephalic neuron count of extant reptiles.

New paper out! 🧪
On reconstructing dinosaur cognition through contemporary cognitive science - a primer on the function of neurons and cognition, the role of extant animals, thermobiology, tools, arms races, foraging, and model-based cognition.
anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

I was looking for a game to practice my portugese a while back and got recommended this series, but never actually tried any. This looks cool! A vida encontra um caminho..

Learned use of an innate sound-meaning association in birds - Nature Ecology & Evolution Over 20 species of geographically and phylogenetically diverse bird species produce convergent whining vocalizations towards their respective brood parasites. Model presentation and playback experiments across multiple continents suggest that these learned calls provoke an innate response even among allopatric species.

This is an awe-inspiring and fascinating study that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. However, the overall framing in terms of "innate versus learned” is unnecessary. The innate versus acquired dichotomy is outdated and has been for a long time. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

It's wild coming from cognitive science to comparative cognition. In cogsci, cognitivism is largely seen as dead and has been for some 20+ years.

It is common to view cognition as being for action. In psychology too.

Yet, this is where they put the blame? The field needs more cogsci, not less.

Rubber arm illusion in octopus The feeling of a body as belonging to oneself is called the sense of body ownership and the centerpiece of conscious experience. Kawashima and Ikeda investigated the sense of body ownership in an octo...

Octopuses respond to the rubber hand illusion. Check out the video abstract. Cool work by Sumire Kawashima and Yuzuru Ikeda--these are the kinds of questions we can be asking to investigate the nature of consciousness www.cell.com/current-biol...

Been really enjoying the Complexity Science Discussion Group hosted by Paul Middlebrooks, where we're working our way through the Santa Fe Institute's "Classic Papers in Complexity Science". The group is open for anyone interested:

braininspired.co/complexity-g...

Which Kind of Science Reform What hope is there for science reform, if we can't agree on what to reform? Right now, principles are more important than practices.

How can we reform science? I have some ideas. But I am not sure you’ll like them, because they don’t promise much. elevanth.org/blog/2025/07...

Now, some thoughts on seeing Aquilops on the big screen! "Our" little dino was one of the stars of Jurassic World, and that was quite an experience as one of the scientists behind the research. (1/n)

Why did cephalopods develop intelligence? And why, being so intelligent and cognitively complex, do they die so young? In this @cp-trendsecolevo.bsky.social ‪paper, the authors explore this paradox from an ecological and evolutionary perspective. www.cell.com/action/showP...

Our letter is out in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social

We argue against a recent claim that animals cannot make mental simulations because they supposedly do not reliably memorize sequences. The evidence for model-based animal cognition is too overwhelming. 🧪
authors.elsevier.com/a/1lKMt_V1r-...

Temporal integration and decision-making in crocodiles Summary: Crocodiles' attraction to two sensory stimuli (water vibration and airborne sound) is independent of the order of arrival of these stimuli, within the limit of a certain time window.

Temporal integration and decision-making in crocodiles 🐊.
New paper by ENES Bioacoustics Research Lab & Co 👇
@biologists.bsky.social @biologyopen.bsky.social
journals.biologists.com/bio/article/...
#bioacoustics
#decisionmaking
#sound
#vibration

A 2.5 meters long female alligator which kept her juvenile colouration. She has a dark back and a yellow underside, notably with yellow lower jaw and throat and yellow stripes on her flank. She lies serenely on the green, fake grass of an indoor enclosure, with a wall and doors in the background.

A close-up on the head of the alligator in the previous picture. She has a juvenile colouration with a dark back and a light yellow lower jaw and throat. We can see the big teeth coming out of her upper jaw and the black pupil in her dark brown eye. She lies serenely on green, fake grass of an indoor enclosure.

I did some data collection with the alligators yesterday and I took a couple of pictures of Sigi after her feeding. She was probably feeling very satisfied.

The field of behaviour genetics has turned out to be something of a damp squib: “genomic information is a statistically non-zero but all in all relatively minor contributor to behavioral differences”

Forelimb reduction and digit loss were evolutionarily decoupled in oviraptorosaurian theropod dinosaurs | Royal Society Open Science Theropod forelimbs exhibit wide morphological disparity, from the elongated wings of birds to the diminutive arms of T. rex. A wealth of work has sought to understand the evolution of bird flight via ...

Many theropods shortened their arms and lost fingers. How did they do it?
Our Edinburgh student Milly Mead, in her first paper, looks into oviraptorosaurs. Arm shortening and finger loss were decoupled!
@funstonpaleo.bsky.social & I are proud supervisors!

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...