Medina-García Angela, Jawor Jodie M, Wright Timothy F
Department of Biology, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces MSC 3AF, 1200 Horseshoe Drive, NM 88003, USA.
Behav Ecol. 2017 Nov-Dec;28(6):1504-1516. doi: 10.1093/beheco/arx116. Epub 2017 Sep 25.
To study the fitness effects of individual variation in cognitive traits, it is paramount to understand whether traits such as personality and physiological stress influence cognitive performance. We first tested whether budgerigars showed both consistent personalities and cognitive performance across time and tasks. We tested object and food neophobia, and exploratory behavior. We measured cognitive performance in habituation, ability to solve foraging problems, spatial memory, and seed discrimination tasks. Budgerigars showed consistency in their neophobic tendencies and these tendencies were associated with their exploratory behavior. Birds were also consistent in how they performed in most of the cognitive tasks (temporal consistency), but were not consistent in their performance across tasks (context consistency). Neither corticosterone levels (baseline and stress-induced) showed a significant relationship with either cognitive or personality measures. Neophobic and exploratory tendencies determined the willingness of birds to engage only in the seed discrimination task. Such tendencies also had a significant effect on problem-solving ability. Our results suggest that consistent individual differences in cognitive performance along with consistent differences in personality could determine response to environmental change and therefore have important fitness consequences.
为了研究认知特征的个体差异对适应性的影响，了解诸如个性和生理应激等特征是否会影响认知表现至关重要。我们首先测试了虎皮鹦鹉在不同时间和任务中是否表现出一致的个性和认知表现。我们测试了对物体和食物的新异性恐惧以及探索行为。我们测量了在习惯化、解决觅食问题的能力、空间记忆和种子辨别任务中的认知表现。虎皮鹦鹉在新异性恐惧倾向方面表现出一致性，并且这些倾向与它们的探索行为相关。鸟类在大多数认知任务中的表现方式也具有一致性（时间一致性），但在不同任务中的表现并不一致（情境一致性）。皮质酮水平（基线水平和应激诱导水平）与认知或个性测量指标均未显示出显著关系。新异性恐惧和探索倾向决定了鸟类仅参与种子辨别任务的意愿。这些倾向对解决问题的能力也有显著影响。我们的结果表明，认知表现的一致个体差异以及个性的一致差异可能决定对环境变化的反应，因此具有重要的适应性后果。
