The Roots of Sociality: Convergent Mechanisms of Social Cognition Across Species

Social behavior is a widespread phenomenon in the animal kingdom. Animals engage in a variety of social interactions with their conspecifics: parents teach and protect their children, perform complex mating displays, and even work together to achieve a common goal. To support such interactions, animals must detect animate agents, identify conspecifics, and classify them as kin, mates, allies, or rivals. These cognitive processes form the foundation of flexible social behavior. Social behaviors share striking phenotypic similarities between animals of phylogenetically distant groups with largely different brain architectures. Such abilities as the innate perception of social cues, individual recognition, and cooperation can be found in fish, birds, and mammals. This suggests that while the neural processing and psychological mechanisms underlying these abilities might have evolved independently, they may rely on functionally similar computational and cognitive principles. Recent advances in computational methods for behavioral analysis and in neural recording techniques now enable direct comparisons of social cognition processing across taxa, providing a unique opportunity to reveal shared psychological principles and mechanisms underlying complex social interactions.This Research Topic aims to gather research investigating sociality in non-human animals, with a focus on the psychological processes and cognitive neural mechanisms that support social behavior at the behavioral and neural levels. The collection specifically focuses on cognitive processes underlying key stages of sociality, from the perception of social cues, to the formation of social representations (e.g., individual recognition), to the decision-making and learning processes involved in the coordination of complex interactions. Neural and computational approaches are welcomed as tools to illuminate these cognitive, psychological processes. The objective is to identify evolutionary parallels across taxa and to uncover general cognitive principles underlying social cognition.This collection welcomes original research articles, systematic reviews, theoretical hypotheses, case studies, and perspective papers addressing topics such as:• Innate perception of socially-relevant cues• Cognitive mechanisms of social familiarization • Behavioral and cognitive neural mechanisms of individual recognition• Social learning and transmission• Collective behavior and group decision-making processes• Psychological mechanisms of cooperative behavior• Explorations of eusocial behavior including recognition, learning, and decision-making• Computational methods for quantifying social cognitive processes and behavioral analysis Topic editors: Dmitry Kobylkov, Anastasia Morandi-Raikova, Mirko Zanon Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/80095/the-roots-of-sociality-convergent-mechanisms-of-social-cognition-across-species