Environmental variation

Finally, I recently started to investigate how cognitive abilities fluctuate over space (between populations), and how they relate to fitness components (reproductive success and survival) under varying conditions (climate, urbanization, density, parasitism, etc.) using a large-scale multi-population study bringing more than 20 monitored populations of wild great tits distributed across Europe. This will allow us to test whether cognitive abilities are more strongly selected under particular conditions, which is essential to understand where and when we may expect adaptive changes in cognitive traits.