Individual Differences and Animal Personality

Locurto, Charles

doi:10.3819/ccbr.2008.20004

Cited by 19 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 58 publications

(65 reference statements)

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“…Individual variation seems a more likely explanation, although difficult to specifically substantiate. For example, individual primates are known to vary in critical psychological traits, including cognitive capabilities, attention capacities, and personality (e.g., Locurto 2007). Differences in motivational state and attention during the task could also have critically affected the outcomes, including across the various studies and among individual animals within each study.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) use positive, but not negative, auditory cues to infer food location

2011

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Nonhuman primates appear to capitalize more effectively on visual cues than corresponding auditory versions. For example, studies of inferential reasoning have shown that monkeys and apes readily respond to seeing that food is present (“positive” cuing) or absent (“negative” cuing). Performance is markedly less effective with auditory cues, with many subjects failing to use this input. Extending recent work, we tested eight captive tufted capuchins (Cebus apella) in locating food using positive and negative cues in visual and auditory domains. The monkeys chose between two opaque cups to receive food contained in one of them. Cup contents were either shown or shaken, providing location cues from both cups, positive cues only from the baited cup, or negative cues from the empty cup. As in previous work, subjects readily used both positive and negative visual cues to secure reward. However, auditory outcomes were both similar to and different from those of earlier studies. Specifically, all subjects came to exploit positive auditory cues, but none responded to negative versions. The animals were also clearly different in visual versus auditory performance. Results indicate that a significant proportion of capuchins may be able to use positive auditory cues, with experience and learning likely playing a critical role. These findings raise the possibility that experience may be significant in visually based performance in this task as well, and highlight that coming to grips with evident differences between visual versus auditory processing may be important for understanding primate cognition more generally.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) use positive, but not negative, auditory cues to infer food location

2011

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“…This is important since personality traits affect individual life-history traits (Biro and Stamps, 2008), therefore having an important role in the fitness of an individual (Dingemanse et al, 2004; Smith and Blumstein, 2008; Réale et al, 2007, 2010; Wolf et al, 2007; Schuett et al, 2010; Wolf and Weissing, 2010). In the same way that cognitive abilities cannot be studied between species without the mentality concept described earlier, inter individual differences in cognitive abilities and personality must be studied conjointly for understanding individual differences in behavior (Locurto, 2007; Carere and Locurto, 2011; Sih and Del Giudice, 2012). Both levels have been central in species evolution.…”

Section: Intra-specific Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconsidering the evolution of brain, cognition, and behavior in birds and mammals

Willemet¹

2013

Front. Psychol.

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Despite decades of research, some of the most basic issues concerning the extraordinarily complex brains and behavior of birds and mammals, such as the factors responsible for the diversity of brain size and composition, are still unclear. This is partly due to a number of conceptual and methodological issues. Determining species and group differences in brain composition requires accounting for the presence of taxon-cerebrotypes and the use of precise statistical methods. The role of allometry in determining brain variables should be revised. In particular, bird and mammalian brains appear to have evolved in response to a variety of selective pressures influencing both brain size and composition. “Brain” and “cognition” are indeed meta-variables, made up of the variables that are ecologically relevant and evolutionarily selected. External indicators of species differences in cognition and behavior are limited by the complexity of these differences. Indeed, behavioral differences between species and individuals are caused by cognitive and affective components. Although intra-species variability forms the basis of species evolution, some of the mechanisms underlying individual differences in brain and behavior appear to differ from those between species. While many issues have persisted over the years because of a lack of appropriate data or methods to test them; several fallacies, particularly those related to the human brain, reflect scientists' preconceptions. The theoretical framework on the evolution of brain, cognition, and behavior in birds and mammals should be reconsidered with these biases in mind.

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“…A link between personality and cognition, albeit by different names, was first established by Pavlov in the early twentieth century during his work examining associative processes (i.e. conditioned reflexes) and digestive physiology [14,[20][21][22]. Pavlov described four different 'types' of nervous systems based on how quickly dogs learned to form different types of associations [23].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linking personality and cognition: a meta-analysis

Dougherty

Guillette

2018

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

167

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 Differences and Animal Personality

Cited by 19 publications

References 58 publications

Capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) use positive, but not negative, auditory cues to infer food location

Capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) use positive, but not negative, auditory cues to infer food location

Reconsidering the evolution of brain, cognition, and behavior in birds and mammals

Linking personality and cognition: a meta-analysis

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