Data from: 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 faster to reach the learning criterion but only in the less difficult discriminant task they performed first. On the contrary, although we found evidence for individual consistency in learning performances, differences among individuals in the number of trials needed to pass the task in both the more difficult discriminant and reversal tasks were not associated with individual differences in neophobia. Thus, our findings indicate that individual differences in contextual plasticity do not necessarily result from some individuals being more sensitive to environmental changes. Instead, we suggest that differences among individuals in their level of plasticity might result from differences in the number of suitable habitats they may occupy.

行为可塑性的个体差异常与人格特质差异相关，其潜在机制之一或许是人格变异与认知变异存在功能上的关联。然而，支持人格与认知之间存在关联的证据仍较为有限且存在矛盾。本研究以斑胸草雀（*Taeniopygia guttata*）为实验对象开展室内实验，旨在探究认知在情境可塑性（即不同情境下的行为可塑性）的个体差异形成过程中所发挥的作用。具体而言，我们通过量化斑胸草雀在沿社会梯度设置的两种不同环境中，于新奇物体附近取食的潜伏期来衡量其新物恐惧（neophobia）水平，并评估了它们在两项辨别任务与一项逆转任务中的学习表现。与研究预期一致，我们发现新物恐惧程度较低的个体，其行为响应可塑性相较于新物恐惧程度较高的个体更低。新物恐惧程度较低的个体同样能更快达到学习标准，但这一现象仅出现在其首先完成的难度较低的辨别任务中。相反，尽管我们发现学习表现存在个体一致性，但在难度更高的辨别任务与逆转任务中，个体完成任务所需的试次数量差异并未与新物恐惧的个体差异产生关联。综上，本研究结果表明，情境可塑性的个体差异未必源于部分个体对环境变化更为敏感。取而代之的是，我们提出个体间可塑性水平的差异，或许源于它们所能占据的适宜栖息地数量存在差异。