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对认知表现存在影响至关重要。本研究首先验证虎皮鹦鹉（budgerigars）是否在不同时间与任务中均表现出稳定的人格特征与认知表现。我们开展了物体新异恐惧、食物新异恐惧与探索行为测试，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。研究结果显示，虎皮鹦鹉的新异恐惧倾向具有个体一致性，且该倾向与其探索行为存在关联；受试鹦鹉在多数认知任务中的表现具备时间一致性（temporal consistency），但在不同任务间的表现并无情境一致性（context consistency）。皮质酮（corticosterone）的基础水平与应激诱导水平，均未与认知指标或人格指标呈现显著相关关系；新异恐惧与探索倾向仅会影响鹦鹉参与种子辨别任务的意愿，此类倾向对问题解决能力亦存在显著影响。本研究结果表明，认知表现的稳定个体差异与人格特征的稳定差异，或可共同决定动物对环境变化的响应方式，进而产生重要的适合度后果。