The main research pathway

Our research aims to explore animals' inventiveness.

Traditional, narrow conceptions of non-human animals’ behaviour assumes that their possible actions are deterministic: their behavioural repertoire is seen as the result of genetically-determined responses to environmental imperatives. This view reduces animals' agency to the mere ability to choose between innate behaviours based on specific goals.

However, ethology informs us that animals can invent new behaviours, and these inventions can impact evolution, for example through gene-culture coevolution. This inventiveness forces us to redefine animal agency in a much stronger way to capture the active role of animals in evolution.
Despite its importance, animal inventiveness is not well understood. While research into behavioural innovations, animal creativity, and cultural and genetic co-evolution is on the rise, these studies lack a common conceptual framework : researchers do not all have the same definition of innovation, invention, or behavioural flexibility, which makes comparative studies difficult. Moreover, although much research has focused on describing and modelling behavioural and cultural innovations—typically understood as 'successful' inventions that have spread and stabilised within a group—there has been relatively little focus on the process of invention itself.

Our research explores the significance of animal agency in evolution by re-defining it as inventiveness. We want to elucidate the way(s) animals invent and the implications of their inventions, by studying their invetiveness through behaviour and proposing an experiment that will enable us to assess its potential evolutionary implications.

Our initial hypotheses, guiding the direction of our research (though they may ultimately lead to dead ends), are as follows:
- The behavioural repertoire of animals, particularly juveniles, is flexible. In other words, animals have the capacity to invent new behaviours
- While animals likely invent differently due to their phylogenetic, cognitive, and morphological differences, their inventiveness may share certain characteristics, allowing us to develop an operational definition for interspecific comparisons.
- Play is a privileged activity for studying invention, and perhaps even plays a direct role in the development of invention.

Here are the different steps of this project.