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