Watanabe Noelle M, Stahlman W David, Blaisdell Aaron P, Garlick Dennis, Fast Cynthia D, Blumstein Daniel T
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1606, USA.
Behav Processes. 2012 Oct;91(2):133-40. doi: 10.1016/j.beproc.2012.06.007. Epub 2012 Jul 3.
There is much interest in studying animal personalities but considerable debate as to how to define and evaluate them. We assessed the utility of one proposed framework while studying personality in terrestrial hermit crabs (Coenobita clypeatus). We recorded the latency of individuals to emerge from their shells over multiple trials in four unique manipulations. We used the specific testing situations within these manipulations to define two temperament categories (shyness-boldness and exploration-avoidance). Our results identified individual behavioral consistency (i.e., personality) across repeated trials of the same situations, within both categories. Additionally, we found correlations between behaviors across contexts (traits) that suggested that the crabs had behavioral syndromes. While we found some correlations between behaviors that are supposed to measure the same temperament trait, these correlations were not inevitable. Furthermore, a principal component analysis (PCA) of our data revealed new relationships between behaviors and provided the foundation for an alternate interpretation: measured behaviors may be situation-specific, and may not reflect general personality traits at all. These results suggest that more attention must be placed on how we infer personalities from standardized methods, and that we must be careful to not force our data to fit our frameworks.
人们对研究动物个性很感兴趣，但对于如何定义和评估动物个性存在相当大的争议。在研究陆生寄居蟹（Coenobita clypeatus）的个性时，我们评估了一个提议框架的实用性。我们在四种独特的操作中进行了多次试验，记录了个体从壳中出来的潜伏期。我们利用这些操作中的特定测试情境来定义两种气质类别（害羞 - 大胆和探索 - 回避）。我们的结果确定了在同一情境的重复试验中，两类个体行为的一致性（即个性）。此外，我们发现不同情境下行为之间的相关性（特质）表明寄居蟹存在行为综合征。虽然我们发现一些本应测量相同气质特质的行为之间存在相关性，但这些相关性并非必然。此外，我们数据的主成分分析（PCA）揭示了行为之间的新关系，并为另一种解释提供了基础：所测量的行为可能是特定于情境的，可能根本不反映一般的个性特质。这些结果表明，我们必须更加关注如何从标准化方法中推断个性，并且必须小心不要强行让我们的数据符合我们的框架。
