Long-term repeatability of cognitive performance

Abstract

Measures of cognitive performance, derived from psychometric tasks, have yielded important insights into the factors governing cognitive variation. However, concerns remain over the robustness of these measures, which may be susceptible to non-cognitive factors such as motivation and persistence. Efforts to quantify short-term repeatability of cognitive performance have gone some way to address this, but crucially the long-term repeatability of cognitive performance has been largely overlooked. Quantifying the long-term repeatability of cognitive performance provides the opportunity to determine the stability of cognitive phenotypes and the potential for selection to act on them. To this end, we quantified long-term repeatability of cognitive performance in wild Australian magpies over a three-year period. Cognitive performance was repeatable in two out of four cognitive tasks—associative learning and reversal-learning performance was repeatable, but spatial memory and inhibitory control performance, although trending toward significance, was not. Measures of general cognitive performance, obtained from principal components analyses carried out on each cognitive test battery, were highly repeatable. Together, these findings provide evidence that at least some cognitive phenotypes are stable, which in turn has important implications for our understanding of cognitive evolution.

General cognitive performance declines with female age and is negatively related to fledging success in a wild bird

“…To control for the potentially confounding effects of memory on cognitive performance, causally identical but visually distinct variants of each task (i.e. different colour combinations or shapes of the transparent barrier) were used for different replicates of the cognitive test battery over the course of the project [ 49 ]. The variant of the cognitive task used in a given replicate was assigned randomly to each individual.…”

Does trappability and self-selection influence cognitive performance?

“…One hundred and ten free-living magpies ( N = 99 adults (individuals > 3 years old), and N = 11 juveniles; N = 74 ringed individuals, and N = 36 unringed individuals) were presented with associative learning tasks between 2015 and 2020 (some of these data have been published previously [ 9 , 19 ]). Attempts were made to test all individuals within a group, regardless of whether they were ringed or not, reducing experimenter bias in selection of test subjects.…”

“…Open Sci. 9: 220473 tasks between 2015 and 2020 (some of these data have been published previously [9,19]). Attempts were made to test all individuals within a group, regardless of whether they were ringed or not, reducing experimenter bias in selection of test subjects.…”

“…To this end, a recent meta-analysis found moderate support for temporal and contextual repeatability of cognitive performance [ 18 ]. Furthermore, short- and long-term repeatability of cognitive performance has been identified in Australian magpies [ 9 , 19 ]. However, the potential influence of sampling biases on cognitive performance has been largely overlooked.…”

General cognitive performance declines with female age and is negatively related to fledging success in a wild bird

“…This study was conceived as part of a long-term project that involved repeatedly quantifying individual cognitive performance (see Supplementary Material section 6). To control for the potentially confounding effects of memory on cognitive performance, causally identical but visually distinct variants of each task were used over the course of the project [54]. Different colour combinations (dark vs light green and purple in 2018; dark vs light green, purple, blue, orange, and pink in 2019 and 2021) and shapes of the transparent barrier (cylinder and wall in 2018; cylinder, wall, arch, umbrella, and corner in 2019 and 2021; Figure S1) were randomly assigned to each individual tested.…”