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，明确人格与生理应激等性状是否会影响认知表现，是至关重要的研究前提。我们首先检验了虎皮鹦鹉（budgerigars）是否在跨时间与跨任务场景下，同时表现出稳定的人格特征与认知表现。我们测试了其物体恐新性、食物恐新性（neophobia）与探索行为，并通过习惯化、觅食问题解决、空间记忆及种子辨别四类任务，量化评估了其认知表现。结果显示，虎皮鹦鹉的恐新性倾向具备一致性，且该倾向与其探索行为显著相关。受试虎皮鹦鹉在多数认知任务中的表现均具备时间一致性（temporal consistency），但在不同任务间的表现并不具备情境一致性（context consistency）。皮质酮（corticosterone）水平（包括基线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相关关系。恐新性与探索性倾向决定了受试虎皮鹦鹉仅愿意参与种子辨别任务的行为倾向，且此类倾向同样对其问题解决能力存在显著影响。本研究结果表明，认知表现的个体一致性差异与人格的一致性差异，可共同决定生物体对环境变化的响应能力，进而产生重要的适合度相关效应。