Does personality affect the ability of individuals to track and respond to changing conditions?

One possibility for why individual differences in behavioral plasticity are frequently associated with differences in personality might be that variation in personality is functionally related to variation in cognition. Evidence supporting a link between personality and cognition, however, is still limited and contradictory. In this study, we then conducted a laboratory experiment with zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) aimed at examining the role of cognition in shaping individual differences in contextual plasticity (i.e., plasticity in behavior between contexts). Specifically, we measured neophobia by quantifying the latency of the birds to eat near a novel object in two different environments across a social gradient and assessed their learning performance on two discriminant tasks and a reversal task. In agreement with our expectation, we found that less neophobic individuals were less plastic in their responses compared to more neophobic ones. Less neophobic individuals were also...