Great-tailed grackle neophobia, persistence, exploration, risk aversion, motor diversity, interobserver reliability data and R code, Santa Barbara, CA USA 2014-2015

Behavioral flexibility is considered important for a species to adapt to environmental change. Yet behavioral flexibility relates to problem solving ability and speed in unpredictable ways. This leaves an open question of whether behavioral flexibility instead varies with differences in individual behaviors, such as neophobia or exploration. If present, these correlations mask which behavior causes individual variation. I investigated whether behavioral flexibility (reversal learning) performances were linked with other behaviors in great-tailed grackles, an invasive bird. I found that behavioral flexibility did not significantly correlate with neophobia, exploration, risk aversion, persistence, or motor diversity. This suggests that great-tailed grackle performance in behavioral flexibility tasks reflect a distinct source of individual variation. Maintaining multiple distinct sources of individual variation, and particularly variation in behavioral flexibility, may be a mechanism for this species’ invasion success by permitting populations to cope with the diversity of novel elements in their environments. (See full information at: Logan CJ. 2016. Behavioral flexibility in an invasive bird is independent of other behaviors. PeerJ 4:e2215. doi:10.7717/peerj.2215 https://peerj.com/articles/2215/)

行为灵活性（Behavioral flexibility）被认为对物种适应环境变化至关重要。然而，行为灵活性与问题解决能力及速度之间的关联方式难以预测。这引出了一个悬而未决的问题：行为灵活性是否反而会随个体行为差异（如新事物恐惧（neophobia）或探索行为（exploration））而变化？若存在此类相关性，则会掩盖导致个体差异的具体行为。我研究了大尾拟八哥（一种入侵鸟类）的行为灵活性（反转学习（reversal learning））表现是否与其他行为相关联。结果发现，行为灵活性与新事物恐惧、探索行为、风险规避（risk aversion）、持久性或运动多样性之间无显著相关性。这表明，大尾拟八哥在行为灵活性任务中的表现反映了一种独特的个体差异来源。维持多种独特的个体差异来源——尤其是行为灵活性的差异——可能是该物种入侵成功的一种机制，使其种群能够应对环境中多样的新元素。（详见：Logan CJ. 2016. Behavioral flexibility in an invasive bird is independent of other behaviors. PeerJ 4:e2215. doi:10.7717/peerj.2215 https://peerj.com/articles/2215/）