The relationship between learning speed and personality is age- and task-dependent in red junglefowl

Abstract

Cognition is fundamental to animals’ lives and an important source of phenotypic variation. Nevertheless, research on individual variation in animal cognition is still limited. Further, although individual cognitive abilities have been suggested to be linked to personality (i.e., consistent behavioral differences among individuals), few studies have linked performance across multiple cognitive tasks to personality traits. Thus, the interplays between cognition and personality are still unclear. We therefore investigated the relationships between an important aspect of cognition, learning, and personality, by exposing young and adult red junglefowl (Gallus gallus) to multiple learning tasks (discriminative, reversal, and spatial learning) and personality assays (novel arena, novel object, and tonic immobility). Learning speed was not correlated across learning tasks, and learning speed in discrimination and spatial learning tasks did not co-vary with personality. However, learning speed in reversal tasks was associated with individual variation in exploration, and in an age-dependent manner. More explorative chicks learned the reversal task faster than less explorative ones, while the opposite association was found for adult females (learning speed could not be assayed in adult males). In the same reversal tasks, we also observed a sex difference in learning speed of chicks, with females learning faster than males. Our results suggest that the relationship between cognition and personality is complex, as shown by its task- and age-dependence, and encourage further investigation of the causality and dynamics of this relationship.Significance statementIn the ancestor of today’s chickens, the red junglefowl, we explored how personality and cognition relate by exposing both chicks and adults to several learning tasks and personality assays. Our birds differed in personality and learning speed, while fast learners in one task did not necessarily learn fast in another (i.e., there were no overall “smarter” birds). Exploration correlated with learning speed in the more complex task of reversal learning: faster exploring chicks, but slower exploring adult females, learned faster, compared to less explorative birds. Other aspects of cognition and personality did not correlate. Our results suggest that cognition and personality are related, and that the relationship can differ depending on task and age of the animal.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1007/s00265-018-2579-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Uninhibited chickens: ranging behaviour impacts motor self-regulation in free-range broiler chickens ( Gallus gallus domesticus )

“…The environmental complexity of different housing conditions and internal factors such as sex, breed and animal personality are known to affect an individual's behaviour, brain morphology and cognitive abilities [14,[40][41][42][43][44]. In our study, animals living under the same conditions but with different propensities to range showed different levels of motor self-regulation.…”

Eco-evolutionary significance of “loners”

“…To do so, we embedded our population-partitioning model into an ecological framework of pairwise strain competition for resources over successive growth-starvation cycles [11,12,41] (S9 Fig; see Materials and Methods). Recent empirical and theoretical work has revealed several life-history traits that are likely to have ecological consequences, such as division rates, spore germination success, cell size, and the existence of loners [10][11][12]17,41,42]. Here, we aim to investigate only whether this newly proposed mechanism of loner allocation and its consequent developmental interactions could have an ecological impact and should therefore be included into ecological frameworks that explore D. discoideum diversity.…”

The role of personality, cognition, and affective state in same-sex contests in the red junglefowl

“…We measured speed to learn the discrimination (hereafter termed "learning speed") as the number of trials the bird had before it chose the correct cue in six consecutive trials (Sorato et al 2018;Zidar et al 2018bZidar et al , 2019. Due to an apparent lack of motivation towards food rewards in males, only females completed this test (see also Zidar et al 2018b). Therefore, whether discriminative learning affected contest initiation or outcome was only investigated in females.…”

“…The role of cognition in contests thus warrants further investigation. Personality and cognition can co-vary and may influence each other (e.g., Zidar et al 2017bZidar et al , 2018bZidar et al , 2019reviewed in Guillette et al 2017;Dougherty and Guillette 2018;Sih & Del Giudice 2012). Therefore, an apparent effect of cognition in contests could be a result from the influence of personality.…”