Collaboration, Exploitation, and Distributed Animal Cognition

Abstract

In this commentary, I explore the space of “distributed cognition” across human and nonhuman animal cognition. First, I distinguish between three varieties in which cognition can be socially distributed and consider their respective implications for the conjectured relationship between group size (social complexity) and individual brain size (cognitive complexity). Second, I probe the relationship between distributed (collaborative) and extended (exploitative) cognition in contexts where our anthropomorphic understanding of this distinction begins to fade.