Elsevier

Animal Behaviour

Volume 83, Issue 3, March 2012, Pages 723-730
Animal Behaviour

Personality affects learning performance in difficult tasks in a sex-dependent way

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.12.020Get rights and content

Animals constantly need to cope with changes in their environment. Coping with changes in cues that are associated with the location and abundance of food is essential for being able to adjust behaviourally to a variable environment. The use of cues in decision making requires appropriate levels of attention and learning ability, which may be affected by the personality of an individual. The relationship between personality, attention and learning as essential mechanisms for behavioural adaptation, however, is not well understood. We studied the relationship between attention to environmental cues, behavioural flexibility in learning and exploratory behaviour, a proxy for personality, in great tits, Parus major. We used a dimensional shift learning paradigm; a learning task involving several stages differing in complexity and requiring attention to changes in relevant cues. The results show personality differences in performance in learning flexibility in only the apparently most difficult stage, yet in opposite directions for males and females. Fast-exploring males showed more flexible learning abilities than slow males, whereas in females slow explorers outperformed fast explorers. These context-dependent and sex-specific personality effects reveal behavioural and cognitive mechanisms that may underlie observed sex- and personality-dependent fitness differences in natural populations.

Highlights

► We investigate the relationship between personality and learning performance. ► Learning performance is dependent on exploratory behaviour in the most difficult task. ► Fast males and slow females show the most flexible learning performance. ► Personality affects flexible learning in difficult situations in sex-specific way. ► This reveals possible mechanisms personality-dependent fitness effects in the wild.

Section snippets

Subjects and Housing

The experiments were conducted between November 2009 and January 2010. Fifty-four wild-type hand-reared great tits (32 males; 22 females) were tested in a dimensional shift paradigm. All subjects hatched in 2009 and were raised by foster parents in the wild until day 10 after hatching and then transferred to the laboratory for standardized hand rearing. Chicks were subjected to a brood size experiment (Naguib et al. 2011) and hand-reared in groups of two or five individuals in natural nests in

General Learning Performance

The learning tests revealed that performance depended on the stage of the learning task (stage: F3,139 = 23.01, P < 0.001). The reversal learning task (CDR) was the most difficult stage as subjects needed significantly more trials to reach the learning criterion in this stage compared to the other stages: CD (Z = 4.44, P < 0.001), IDshift (Z = −5.56, P < 0.001) and EDshift (Z = −3.70, P < 0.001; Fig. 2). There was no effect of brood size (F1,34 = 0.003, P = 0.96), catch-up growth (F1,138 = 2.06, P = 0.15) or condition

Discussion

The results reveal that learning performance depended on exploratory behaviour of the bird, yet in opposite ways for males and females and only in the most difficult stage. Birds needed more trials in the reversal stage compared to the other stages, indicating that reversal learning was more difficult than the intra- and extradimensional shifts. Only in this reversal stage, in which birds had most difficulties, was an effect of exploratory behaviour on learning performance found. In contrast to

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Marylou van Aaldering and Floor Petit for animal caretaking, Mathieu Amy for discussions and Bonne Beerda as well as two anonymous referees for comments on the manuscript.

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