Sometimes slower is better: slow-exploring birds are more sensitive to changes in a vocal discrimination task
Lauren M. Guillette
Adam R. Reddon
Marisa Hoeschele
Christopher B. Sturdy
()
0
Present address: Animal Behaviour Group, Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour, McMaster University
, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8S 4L8
1
Centre for Neuroscience, University of Alberta
,
Edmonton
, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E9
2
Department of Psychology
Articles on similar topics can be found in the following collections Receive free email alerts when new articles cite this article - sign up in the box at the top right-hand corner of the article or click here
-
Subject collections
Email alerting service
To subscribe to Proc. R. Soc. B go to: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/subscriptions
Sometimes slower is better: slow-exploring
birds are more sensitive to changes
in a vocal discrimination task
and Christopher B. Sturdy1,2,*
Animal personality, defined as consistent individual differences across context and time, has attracted
much recent research interest in the study of animal behaviour. More recently, this field has begun to
examine how such variation arose and is maintained within populations. The habitat-dependent selection
hypothesis, which posits that animals with differing personality types may fare better (i.e. have a fitness
advantage) in different habitats, suggests one possible mechanism. In the current experiment, we
tested whether slow- and fast-exploring black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus), determined by
performance in a novel environment exploration task, perform differentially when the demands of an acoustic
operant discrimination (cognitive) task were altered following successful task acquisition. We found that
slow-exploring birds learn to reverse previously learned natural category rules more quickly than faster
exploring conspecifics. In accordance with the habitat-dependent selection hypothesis, and previous
work with great tits (Parus major), a close relative of the black-capped chickadee, our results suggest
that fast-exploring birds may perform better in stable, predictable environments where forming a routine
is advantageous, while slow-exploring birds are favoured in unstable, unpredictable environments, where
task demands often change. Our results also support a hypothesis derived from previous work with great
tits; slow-exploring birds may be generally more flexible (i.e. able to modify their behaviour in accordance
with changes in environmental stimuli) in some learning tasks.
1. INTRODUCTION
The study of animal personality (also known as
temperament [1], behavioural syndromes [2] and coping styles
[3]) is concerned with how behavioural characteristics
are related across contexts and over time within a species.
A survey of personality-related research by Gosling [4]
showed that such studies included 66 species spanning a
diverse array of taxa. As species are added to this list
(e.g. [5 7]; see [8 10] for recent reviews), so too are
new behavioural characteristics being linked to existing
suites of correlated traits (e.g. boldness correlates with
aggressiveness [11]).
The field of animal personality has begun to pose
questions about how individual differences in behaviour
develop, evolve and how these differences are maintained
within a species or a population [8,9,12]. Individuals can
differ in their overall personality (or behavioural profile)
associated with differing life-history strategies [13 15].
For instance, some individuals may focus on current
reproduction and thus behave in a more risk-prone
manner, whereas other individuals may focus on
future reproduction and behave in a more risk-averse
manner [14,16]. Variation in the personality of animals
within a species may be maintained when one personality
phenotype is rare and has higher fitness compared
with alternate personality phenotype(s) (negative
frequency-dependent selection [14,16,17]) or is more
effective in different local habitats (habitat-dependent
selection [1,16]).
While individual variation in exploratory behaviour
represents one of the best-studied personality
characteristics (e.g. [1,11,18 20]), individual variation in
learning ability has received less attention [2,3,21].
Previous work has suggested that individual variation in
discrimination learning is related to how black-capped
chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) explore a novel
environment [6]. Guillette et al. [6] showed that chickadees
which are quicker to explore a novel environment are also
quicker to learn an acoustic operant discrimination task.
The notion that, in general, fast explorers are fast learners
is further supported by evidence from a study with
wildcaught male starlings (Sturnus vulgaris [22]). Boogert
et al. [22] found that starlings which were faster to feed
in a novel environment solved a learning task faster than
starlings that were slower to feed in a novel environment.
Here, we test the idea that fast explorers may perform
better in a stable (predictable) environment where it is
adaptive to learn new tasks qui (...truncated)