Aggressive spiders make the wrong decision in a difficult task

Accurate and timely decisions are critical for foraging, predator avoidance, and reproductive success. However, there is often a trade-off between speed and accuracy in decision-making, where individuals that make decisions more quickly make more mistakes. An individual’s personality may influence its decision-making style (i.e. whether it errs more in the speed or accuracy of a decision) and this relationship may change depending on contexts. Despite growing research on invertebrate personality, how personality correlates with decision-making style is still largely unknown and little research has assessed these relationships across tasks of varying difficulty. Here we test the relationship between aggressiveness and decision-making style in Portia labiata, a specialized spider-eating jumping spider, in both a simple and a difficult task. We found that aggressive spiders made fewer directional changes before completing the tasks, regardless of task difficulty. However, decision accuracy...