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Big Brains and Changing Environments: Cause or Consequence?

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 14, 2026 · UTC

Large brains are metabolically costly, and associations with changing environments do not imply they evolved there, as the Cognitive Buffer Hypothesis (CBH) would suggest. They may instead evolve in stable conditions and later facilitate colonization of changing environments. Using neuro-evolution in an artificial seasonal foraging task, we compared agents evolving exclusively in changing environments to agents first evolved in static environments before transitioning. Results show that larger neural networks in dynamic environments arise mainly from prior static evolution, achieving superior

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First collected: 2026-09-20T09:41:04.278Z. This is not the publication date.