Evolution and Ecology, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2010 Dec 27;365(1560):4029-41. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2010.0218.
Developmental processes can have major impacts on the correlations in behaviour across contexts (contextual generality) and across time (temporal consistency) that are the hallmarks of animal personality. Personality can and does change: at any given age or life stage it is contingent upon a wide range of experiential factors that occurred earlier in life, from prior to conception through adulthood. We show how developmental reaction norms that describe the effects of prior experience on a given behaviour can be used to determine whether the effects of a given experience at a given age will affect contextual generality at a later age, and to illustrate how variation within individuals in developmental plasticity leads to variation in contextual generality across individuals as a function of experience. We also show why niche-picking and niche-construction, behavioural processes which allow individuals to affect their own developmental environment, can affect the contextual generality and the temporal consistency of personality. We conclude by discussing how an appreciation of developmental processes can alert behavioural ecologists studying animal personality to critical, untested assumptions that underlie their own research programmes, and outline situations in which a developmental perspective can improve studies of the functional significance and evolution of animal personality.
发展过程可能会对行为在不同情境（情境普遍性）和不同时间（时间一致性）之间的相关性产生重大影响，这些都是动物个性的标志。个性可以而且确实会发生变化：在任何特定的年龄或生命阶段，它都取决于生命早期发生的一系列广泛的经验因素，从受孕前到成年期。我们展示了如何使用描述先前经验对特定行为影响的发展反应规范来确定在特定年龄的特定经验是否会影响以后年龄的情境普遍性，并说明个体发展可塑性的差异如何导致个体之间的情境普遍性因经验而异。我们还展示了为什么选择生态位和构建生态位（允许个体影响自身发育环境的行为过程）会影响个性的情境普遍性和时间一致性。最后，我们讨论了对发展过程的认识如何提醒研究动物个性的行为生态学家注意其自身研究计划所依据的关键、未经检验的假设，并概述了发展视角可以改善动物个性的功能意义和进化研究的情况。
