Editorial: Cognitive movement ecology

Abstract

Papers, dissertations and books devoted to the analysis of animal movement often invite interest in the subject with the incontrovertible claim that all animals move. It is no less true and no less obvious that all animals perceive, remember, and think (though cognitive scientists seem less obligated to remind everyone of the fact). Perception, memory, orientation, and navigation are all cognitive components that have been identified, in a zeitgeisty collection of simultaneous independent studies, as central to animal movement (Nathan et al. 2008, Mueller and Fagan 2008, Schick et al. 2008). And yet, the cognitive causes and consequences of animal movement remain nearly as understudied now (Joo et al. 2022) as then (Holyoak et al. 2008).There are several reasons behind the apparent chasm dividing these fields. Many developments in movement ecology often "chase" both the data and the rapidly developing telemetry technology, the development of which is often driven in support of concrete needs to monitor animal populations for management or conservation. Although biologists are generally aware, and often in awe, of the cognitive ability of their study species, the very thought of trying to measure or quantify something as unobservable as cognition is daunting and of limited apparent practical utility.In contrast, the history and pedigree of ethological studies on animals is much longer. One might argue that, as an applied exercise, it includes all human groups that have ever engaged in the domestication of wild animals. In the Western scientific tradition, notably contributors include Darwin, Pavlov, and Lorenz. However, as a scientific endeavor, ethology has focused on animals that are easy to observe and therefore amenable to controlled experimentation, in almost all cases captive or domesticated (Wynne and Udell 2020). Much as the wildlife manager may wonder what practical information can be obtained from considering cognition in a wild deer, an ethologist may wonder what can possibly be inferred about the cognition of an animal that can only be indirectly observed through blips of satellite locations and upon whom experimental manipulation is impractical. With the exception of a handful of neurological phenomena, cognitive processes are latent, and there are good reasons to shy away from studying what we cannot observe.And yet, in the past decade there has been growing theoretical and empirical evidence that perception (Fagan et al. 2017), spatial memory (Fagan et al. 2013, Merkle et al. 2014, Avgar et al. 2015, Schlagel et al. 2017), and social and experiential learning (Mueller et al. 2013, Berdahl et al. 2018, Jesmer et al. 2018, Abrahms et al. 2021) are all fundamental to the way that freeranging animals use space. It therefore felt timely and important to collect original research under the novel rubric of "Cognitive Movement Ecology" into a single collection. We invited a wide array of conceptual, theoretical, and empirical papers, which we believe reflect the diversity of perspectives characterizing this relatively new sub-field, and which we hope will aid in create dialog among those of us who already study cognitive movement ecology and attract others to join the party.The resulting Special Topics collection includes 15 contributions which strike, we feel, an admirable balance between concepts, theory, methods and applications. Specifically, our collection is comprised of: 2 high-level reviews, 4 explicitly theoretical contributions leaning on numerical analysis and simulation, 2 articles that propose novel heuristic approaches to inferring cognition from movement data, and, finally, 7 articles that bravely seek to make direct inference and even predictions about cognitive processes of free ranging animals based primarily on movement data. We provided no explicit guidelines to definitions or themes and were struck by the ways in which important themes emerged and similar goals were set in papers with markedly differ