Individual consistency in multiple cognitive performance: behavioural versus cognitive syndromes

Guenther, Anja; Brust, Vera

doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2017.06.011

Cited by 39 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 52 publications

(74 reference statements)

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“…Although we acknowledge that results from the literature on test -retest [25,34] or convergent validity [47] in psychology would be relevant to compare with the present study, we also considered them beyond the scope of this paper as their inclusion would have led to a heavy bias towards studies on humans. We only found six publications reporting repeatability values for cognitive performance (R) in six different species: one arachnid [48], two mammals [35,49,50] and three birds [15,51,52], with a sample size ranging from 15 to 347 (mean: 54.7, median: 33) and number of repeated tests varying from 2 to 4 (mean: 2.5, median: 2).…”

Section: Materials and Methods (A) Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The repeatability of cognitive performance: a meta-analysis

Cauchoix

Chow

Horik

et al. 2018

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

134

146

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Behavioural and cognitive processes play important roles in mediating an individual's interactions with its environment. Yet, while there is a vast literature on repeatable individual differences in behaviour, relatively little is known about the repeatability of cognitive performance. To further our understanding of the evolution of cognition, we gathered 44 studies on individual performance of 25 species across six animal classes and used meta-analysis to assess whether cognitive performance is repeatable. We compared repeatability () in performance (1) on the same task presented at different times (temporal repeatability), and (2) on different tasks that measured the same putative cognitive ability (contextual repeatability). We also addressed whether estimates were influenced by seven extrinsic factors (moderators): type of cognitive performance measurement, type of cognitive task, delay between tests, origin of the subjects, experimental context, taxonomic class and publication status. We found support for both temporal and contextual repeatability of cognitive performance, with mean estimates ranging between 0.15 and 0.28. Repeatability estimates were mostly influenced by the type of cognitive performance measures and publication status. Our findings highlight the widespread occurrence of consistent inter-individual variation in cognition across a range of taxa which, like behaviour, may be associated with fitness outcomes.This article is part of the theme issue 'Causes and consequences of individual differences in cognitive abilities'.

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Section: Materials and Methods (A) Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The repeatability of cognitive performance: a meta-analysis

Cauchoix

Chow

Horik

et al. 2018

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

134

146

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…During the testing trials, all feeders remained wrapped in paper but only one (randomly assigned) feeder contained food. The criterion for having learned the feeder position was to have visited the correct feeder 8 times within a moving window of 10 visits (Guenther & Brust, 2017). The number of visits to reach criterion was used as a measure of learning.…”

Section: Large-scale Spatial Learning Taskmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In fact, other studies looking at the same domain-specific cognitive abilities found little evidence of contextual repeatability, particularly for associative learning (Boogert et al, 2011;Bray et al, 2014;Brucks et al, 2017;Guenther & Brust, 2017;Isden et al, 2013;Keagy et al, 2009;Morand-Ferron et al, 2011;Shaw et al, 2015;van Horik et al, 2019;van Horik, Langley, Whiteside, Laker, Beardsworth, et al, 2018;Vernouillet et al, 2018). While a handful of studies have adopted test batteries to measure individual differences in cognitive abilities (Anderson et al, 2017;Ashton et al, 2018;Boogert et al, 2011;Guenther & Brust, 2017;Isden et al, 2013;Shaw et al, 2015;Soha et al, 2019;, this approach remains relatively rare and few studies have explicitly tested contextual repeatability in multiple cognitive abilities. The gold standard would be to measure multiple traits across time and contexts in order to validate those measures of cognition (Völter et al, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

No evidence for cross-contextual consistency in spatial learning and behavioural flexibility in a passerine

Troisi

Cooke

Davidson

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Although the evolution of cognitive differences among species has long been of interest in ecology, whether natural selection acts on cognitive processes within populations has only begun to receive similar attention. One of the key challenges is to understand how consistently cognitive traits within any one domain are expressed over time and across different contexts, as this has direct implications for the way in which selection might act on this variation. Animal studies typically measure a cognitive domain using only one task in one context, and assume that this captures the likely expression of that domain in different contexts. This deficit is not surprising because, from an ecologist's perspective, cognitive tasks are notoriously laborious to employ, and for design reasons most tasks can only be deployed in a specific context. Thus our knowledge of whether individual differences in cognitive abilities are consistent across contexts is limited. Using a wild population of great tits (Parus major) we characterised consistency of two cognitive abilities, each in two different contexts: 1) spatial learning at two different spatial scales, and 2) behavioural flexibility as both performance in a detour reaching task and reversal learning in a spatial task. We found no evidence of a correlation between the two spatial learning speeds, or between the two measures of behavioural flexibility. This suggests that cognitive performance is highly plastic and sensitive to differences across tasks, or that variants of these well-known tasks may tap into different combinations of both cognitive and non-cognitive mechanisms, or that they simply do not adequately measure each putative cognitive domain. Our results highlight the challenges of developing standardised cognitive assays to explain natural behaviour and to understand the selective consequences of that variation.

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“…The final dataset consisted of 25 studies and 66 effect sizes, testing 652 individuals in total. This included data for 19 species across a broad taxonomic range, including insects[70], fish[46,[71][72][73][74][75], reptiles[76], birds[33,42,47,[77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84][85] and mammals[86][87][88][89][90].…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Linking personality and cognition: a meta-analysis

Dougherty

Guillette

2018

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

168

155

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In the past decade, several conceptual papers have linked variation in animal personality to variation in cognition, and recent years have seen a flood of empirical studies testing this link. However, these results have not been synthesized in a quantitative way. Here, we systematically search the literature and conduct a phylogenetically controlled meta-analysis of empirical papers that have tested the relationship between animal personality (exploration, boldness, activity, aggression and sociability) and cognition (initial learning/reversal speed, number of correct choices/errors after standard training). We find evidence for a small but significant relationship between variation in personality and variation in learning across species in the absolute scale; however, the of this relationship is highly variable and when both positive and negative effect sizes are considered, the average effect size does not differ significantly from zero. Importantly, this variation among studies is not explained by differences in personality or learning measure, or taxonomic grouping. Further, these results do not support current hypotheses suggesting that that fast-explorers are fast-learners or that slow-explorers perform better on tests of reversal learning. Rather, we find evidence that bold animals are faster learners, but only when boldness is measured in response to a predator (or simulated predator) and not when boldness is measured by exposure to a novel object (or novel food). Further, although only a small sub-sample of papers reported results separately for males and females, sex explained a significant amount of variation in effect size. These results, therefore, suggest that, while personality and learning are indeed related across a range of species, the direction of this relationship is highly variable. Thus further empirical work is needed to determine whether there are important moderators of this relationship.This article is part of the theme issue 'Causes and consequences of individual differences in cognitive abilities'.

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Individual consistency in multiple cognitive performance: behavioural versus cognitive syndromes

Cited by 39 publications

References 52 publications

The repeatability of cognitive performance: a meta-analysis

The repeatability of cognitive performance: a meta-analysis

No evidence for cross-contextual consistency in spatial learning and behavioural flexibility in a passerine

Linking personality and cognition: a meta-analysis

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