Highlights•Birds can show cultural behaviour across multiple behavioural
contexts.•Evolutionary theory is a useful tool to examine cultural change over time.•I review …

Behavioural innovations have become central to our thinking about how animals adjust to
changing environments. It is now well established that animals vary in their ability to …

While human-induced rapid environmental changes are putting many organisms at risk of
extinction, others are doing better than ever. This raises the question of why organisms differ …

Cognition is defined as the processes by which animals collect, retain and use information
from their environment to guide their behaviour. Thus cognition is essential in a wide range …

Animal cognition experiments frequently reveal striking individual variation but rarely
consider its causes and largely ignore its potential consequences. Studies often focus on a …

Innovative animals are those able to solve novel problems or invent novel solutions to
existing problems. Despite the important ecological and evolutionary consequences of …

Cognition has been studied intensively for several decades, but the evolutionary processes
that shape individual variation in cognitive traits remain elusive [1–3]. For instance, the …

Behavioural innovations may have far-reaching evolutionary and ecological consequences,
allowing individuals to obtain new resources and cope with environmental change …

Although interindividual variation in problem-solving ability is well documented, its relation
to variation in fitness in the wild remains unclear. We investigated the relationship between …

Patterns of individual differences in cognition have been studied empirically and
systematically in the last decade, but causes and consequences of this variation are still …