Stressfulness of the design influences consistency of cognitive measures and their correlation with animal personality traits in wild mice (Mus musculus)

Abstract

Individual variation in cognition is being increasingly recognized as an important evolutionary force but contradictory results so far hamper a general understanding of consistency and association with other behaviors. Partly, this might be caused by external factors imposed by the design. Stress, for example, is known to influence cognition, with mild stress improving learning abilities, while strong or chronic stress impairs them. Also, there might be intraspecific variation in how stressful a given situation is perceived. We investigated two personality traits (stress coping and voluntary exploration), spatial learning with two mazes, and problem-solving in low- and high-stress tests with a group of 30 female wild mice (Mus musculus domesticus). For each test, perceived stress was assessed by measuring body temperature change with infrared thermography, a new non-invasive method that measures skin temperature as a proxy of changes in the sympathetic system activity. While spatial learning and problem-solving were found to be repeatable traits in mice in earlier studies, none of the learning measures were significantly repeatable between the two stress conditions in our study, indicating that the stress level impacts learning. We found correlations between learning and personality traits; however, they differed between the two stress conditions and between the cognitive tasks, suggesting that different mechanisms underlie these processes. These findings could explain some of the contradictory findings in the literature and argue for very careful design of cognitive test setups to draw evolutionary implications.

Evidence for a Two Component Cognitive Structure in Pigeons (Columba livia)

“…Non-cognitive factors, like persistence and neophobia, should also be assessed. While it seems unlikely to explain the results obtained here, non-cognitive factors have been shown to differentially impact performance on seemingly cognitive tasks and should be explicitly accounted for (Carere & Locurto, 2011;Cole & Quinn, 2012;Delacoux & Guenther, 2023;Isden et al, 2013;Shaw & Schmelz, 2017). Finally, and on a more practical note, ideally the entire test battery should take far less time to complete.…”

Editorial: Animal-friendly methods for rodent behavioral testing in neuroscience research

“…In the second, Watanabe reviews the use of a non-invasive and contactless technique, infrared thermography, to evaluate social judgements in mice and highlights the potential of this non-invasive tool for the animal-friendly study of cognition and emotion in rodents [ Watanabe (b) ]. This approach has currently been employed in various rodents, including laboratory mice (Watanabe, 2015 ), laboratory rats (Wongsaengchan et al, 2023 ) and wild mice (Delacoux and Guenther, 2023 ), as well as in many non-rodent species (Mota-Rojas et al, 2021 ).…”