Worms under cover: relationships between performance in learning tasks and personality in great tits (Parus major)

Abstract

In animals, individual differences in learning ability are common and are in part explained by genetic differences, developmental conditions and by general experience. Yet, not all variations in learning are well understood. Individual differences in learning may be associated with elementary individual characteristics that are consistent across situations and over time, commonly referred to as personality or temperament. Here, we tested whether or not male great tits (Parus major) from two selection lines for fast or slow exploratory behaviour, an operational measure for avian personality, vary in their learning performance in two related consecutive tasks. In the first task, birds had to associate a colour with a reward whereas in the second task, they had to associate a new colour with a reward ignoring the previously rewarded colour. Slow explorers had shorter latencies to approach the experimental device compared with fast explorers in both tasks, but birds from the two selection lines did not differ in accomplishing the first task, that is, to associate a colour with a reward. However, in the second task, fast explorers had longer latencies to solve the trials than slow explorers. Moreover, relative to the number of trials needed to reach the learning criteria in the first task, birds from the slow selection line took more trials to associate a new colour with a reward while ignoring the previously learned association compared with birds from the fast selection line. Overall, the experiments suggest that personality in great tits is not strongly related to learning per se in such an association task, but that birds from different selection lines might express different learning strategies as birds from the different selection lines were differently affected by their previous learning performance.

Environmental and genetic determinants of innovativeness in a natural population of birds

“…Previously we found no link between EB and PSP in our population, albeit with a smaller sample size [81], though EB has been linked to cognitive traits in some tit populations [86,87].…”

Developmental stress impairs performance on an association task in male and female songbirds, but impairs auditory learning in females only

“…Various protocols to assess cognitive abilities have been developed for captive songbirds (e.g. Boogert et al 2011;Amy et al 2012) and have been successfully implemented in studies examining the effects of developmental stress on learning impairments into adulthood (Fisher et al 2006;Kriengwatana et al 2015). It would be prudent to conduct additional cognitive tests for two reasons.…”

Fast- and slow-exploring pigeons differ in how they use previously learned rules

“…For example, Fast-explorers learn new appetitive tasks more quickly than slow-explorers (black-capped chickadees Poecile atricapillus Guillette et al, 2009; Panamanian bishop fish Brachyrhaphis episcopi DePasquale et al, 2014), whereas slow-explorers perform better than fast-explorers on reversal learning (black-capped chickadees Guillette et al, 2011;great tits Verbeek et al, 1994; but see Amy et al 2012 where the oppostie was found in great tits) or avoidance learning tasks (great tits Exnerová et al, 2010). Most of the experiments on exploratory behavioural and cognition have focused on variation in learning speed (also called learning rate, e.g., trials to reach learning criteria, marked with 'A' for information acquisition in Table 1).…”