Animal Cognition in Urban Environments: The effect of diet and the gut microbiome

Natural habitats are disappearing at record speeds, and our world is becoming increasingly urbanised.

Recently, researchers started exploring how cognitive abilities (the mechanisms by which animals acquire, process, store and act on information from the environment) may allow animals to adapt to urban environments.

Many of these studies revealed cognitive differences between urban and non-urban dwelling animals and linked these to informational challenges related to the highly dynamic nature of urban environments. Here I hypothesize that urban diets also contribute to such cognitive differences.

Although lab-based studies indeed showed important effects of diet on the development of cognition, this idea so far received little attention in the urban cognition literature.

I will address this important knowledge gap by combining theoretical frameworks and methodology from psychology, ecology, and microbial sciences.

Furthermore, as most of the previous work linking urbanization with cognition was correlational in nature, I will supplement my interdisciplinary approach with a powerful combination of controlled laboratory experiments and measures of cognition in the wild.

Specifically, I will test how high-fat high-sugar diets (WP1), and the gut microbiome (WP2) shape cognition in three domains that are considered crucial for survival in urban environments, namely spatial learning, inhibitory control, and social learning.

I will use feral pigeons, a species that thrives in urban environments, and whose diet varies widely between urban and non-urban environments, as my model species.

This project will build on my experience as an animal cognition researcher, allow me to develop new methods to measure cognition and acquire new skills in GPS tracking and microbiology.

By combining approaches from different fields, and continuing implementing open-science practices, this project will raise my profile internationally in the field of cognitive ecology.