Data from: Cognition, personality, and stress in budgerigars, Melopsittacus undulatus

To study the fitness effects of individual variation in cognitive traits, it is paramount to understand whether traits such as personality and physiological stress influence cognitive performance. We first tested whether budgerigars showed both consistent personalities and cognitive performance across time and tasks. We tested object and food neophobia, and exploratory behavior. We measured cognitive performance in habituation, ability to solve foraging problems, spatial memory, and seed discrimination tasks. Budgerigars showed consistency in their neophobic tendencies and these tendencies were associated with their exploratory behavior. Birds were also consistent in how they performed in most of the cognitive tasks (temporal consistency), but were not consistent in their performance across tasks (context consistency). Neither corticosterone levels (baseline and stress-induced) showed a significant relationship with either cognitive or personality measures. Neophobic and exploratory tendencies determined the willingness of birds to engage only in the seed discrimination task. Such tendencies also had a significant effect on problem-solving ability. Our results suggest that consistent individual differences in cognitive performance along with consistent differences in personality could determine response to environmental change and therefore have important fitness consequences.

为探究认知性状个体差异的适合度效应，明确人格、生理应激等性状是否会影响认知表现至关重要。我们首先检验了虎皮鹦鹉是否在不同时间与任务中表现出稳定的人格与认知表现：我们测试了其物品新异恐惧症、食物新异恐惧症以及探索行为，并通过习惯化任务、觅食问题解决任务、空间记忆任务与种子辨别任务评估其认知表现。结果显示，虎皮鹦鹉的新异恐惧倾向具有稳定性，且该倾向与其探索行为存在关联；虎皮鹦鹉在多数认知任务中的表现具备时间稳定性，但在不同任务间的表现缺乏情境稳定性。皮质酮的基础水平与应激诱导水平均未与认知或人格测量指标呈现显著关联。新异恐惧与探索倾向决定了虎皮鹦鹉仅参与种子辨别任务的意愿，且此类倾向对其问题解决能力存在显著影响。本研究结果表明，认知表现的稳定个体差异与人格的稳定差异共同决定了生物对环境变化的响应方式，因此会产生重要的适合度后果。