Evaluating the Performance and Fragility of Large Language Models on the Self-Assessment for Neurological Surgeons.

Despite the unprecedented challenges posed by the rapid pace of human‐induced environmental changes, some animals can persist and even thrive in human‐altered environments. As evolutionary change through natural selection is often too slow to enable adaptation, these animals seem to cope with anthropogenic change due to their high behavioural flexibility (Vardi & Berger‐Tal, ). Often referred to as ‘urban adapters’ and ‘exploiters’ (see Glossary for definitions of key terms), these species can take advantage of environments with varying levels of human disturbance by altering aspects of their behaviour (McKinney, ). For instance, a comparative study on wild boar () populations showed that urban individuals' diets contained a higher proportion of anthropogenic foods, suggesting that changes in feeding behaviour supported the exploitation of urban niches (Castillo‐Contreras et al., ; Sih et al., ). Although there is growing evidence that many different species can benefit from exploiting novel resources in urban environments (Sih et al., ), human activities can also generate substantial uncertainty, which may require animals to attend and respond to information to make adaptive decisions (Lee & Thornton, ). Uncertainty, a concept from information theory (Shannon, ), is considered high when different outcomes of variables, such as external stimuli or an individual's actions, are equally likely or useful. Thus, uncertainty can be high if an animal is faced with an ambiguous anthropogenic stimulus, such as a novel object, that could indicate a threat and/or an opportunity. The reduction of such uncertainty could be achieved through different mechanisms, potentially involving cognition (Griffin et al., ; Lee & Thornton, ) and affective states, and recent theories propose that uncertainty reduction is a key function of the brain (Friston, ). Although they are often considered separately, cognition and affective states are likely complementary and closely linked mechanistically and functionally in resolving uncertainty and driving decision‐making in animals (Pessoa, ). Cognition can broadly be defined as the neural processes that involve gathering, processing, storing and acting upon information from the environment (Shettleworth, ), and the role of cognition in coping with environmental change has sometimes been referred to as a ‘cognitive buffer’ (Sol, , ). Information that is processed cognitively can be obtained individually (personal information), or from other individuals, such as conspecifics and heterospecifics (social information) (Danchin et al., ). Affective states are also an important mechanism through which animals evaluate their environment and make decisions (Mendl & Paul, ). While there is no ubiquitous definition of affective states, we define them as short‐ and long‐term mental states which are valanced: that is, they are positive or negative; pleasant or unpleasant (Mendl & Paul, ; Russell, ). This definition stems from our own conscious experiences of mental states (‘feelings’) that we label as emotions or moods (Mendl et al., ). Because we cannot directly measure subjective states in non‐human animals (we use language as a gold standard, yet fallible, measure in humans), we cannot be certain about whether and which other species consciously experience them; hence, this issue remains a topic of heated debate (e.g. Boly et al., ; Klein & Barron, ; Panksepp, ; Paul et al., ). Nevertheless, by considering affective states as comprising components including subjective, behavioural, physiological, neurological and cognitive changes (Paul et al., ; Scherer, ), it is possible to scientifically study animal affect in the absence of certainty about the conscious subjective component, by measuring the other components (Mendl et al., ). Thus, indicators of affective states in response to environmental stimuli, such as anthropogenic stimuli, can be objectively measured through physiological, neurological, behavioural and cognitive markers (Mendl & Paul, ). Anthropogenic activities may pose uncertainty that could induce and influence measurable cognitive, behavioural and affective responses in animals (Anderson et al., ) (Figure ). For example, urban herring gulls () show similar behavioural and affective responses to conspecific alarm calls and human shouting (Di Giovanni et al., ). Human shouting induces uncertainty here because it may correspond to a human threatening the gull, or the shouting may be unrelated to the gull's presence and thus would not pose a threat. In animals including humans, uncertainty tends to induce a negative affective state, such as discomfort and distress (although positive affective states are also possible) (Anderson et al., ; Grupe & Nitschke, ). Such a negative affective state may, in turn, serve as a mechanism eliciting adaptive responses to resolve such uncertainty, for example, by driving the animal to gather additional information about a stimulus (thus alleviating the a