Sometimes slower is better: slow-exploring birds are more sensitive to changes in a vocal discrimination task

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Mar 2011

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.

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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)


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Lauren M. Guillette, Adam R. Reddon, Marisa Hoeschele, Christopher B. Sturdy. Sometimes slower is better: slow-exploring birds are more sensitive to changes in a vocal discrimination task, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2011, pp. 767-773, 278/1706, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.1669