Study
Extended spider cognition
Japyassú, Hilton F.; Laland, Kevin N.
Animal Cognition, 2017
A review assembling evidence that web properties influence what a spider attends to and how it decides, and arguing that the web should be treated as part of the spider’s cognitive system rather than as an artefact it produces.
- Studied in
- Araneae
- Sample size
- synthesis of web-building and web-use experiments
Spiders adjust web design according to prey experience and hunger, and their subsequent decisions depend on the web they built — an outsourcing of information storage and processing to a structure outside the body.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Spider cognition is extended into the web, with the web performing functions that would otherwise require neural machinery.
How NatureHQ reads it
A genuinely contested framing, held here as such. "Extended cognition" is a philosophical position about where the boundary of a cognitive system lies, and calling the web part of the spider’s mind does not add an empirical claim to the observation that web design affects later behaviour. What the paper does well is make the alternative to a tiny-brain deficit story vivid: a spider does not need to remember much if the structure it is sitting in remembers for it.
- A theoretical framework rather than new evidence.
- The extended-cognition claim is not independently testable against the plainer description.
- Draws on a small number of well-studied web-builders.
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Published by: Springer journalsPublished in a Springer journal.
doi.org/10.1007/s10071-017-1069-7
This reference was resolved automatically against Crossref on 2026-08-11.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-08-09.