Interaction between animal personality and animal cognition

By Claudio Carere, C. Locurto. 2011

305 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The study of animal personality has attracted considerable attention, as it has revealed a number of similarities in personality between humans and several nonhuman species. At the same time the adaptive value and evolutionary maintenance of different personalities are the subject of debate. Since Pavlov's work on dogs, students of comparative cognition have been aware that animals display vast individual differences on cognitive tasks, and that these differences may not be entirely accounted for differences in cognitive abilities. Here, we argue that personality is an important source of variation that may affect cognitive performance and we hypothesise mutual influences between personality and cognition across an individual's lifespan. In particu- lar, we suggest that: 1) personality profiles may be markers of different cognitive styles; 2) success or failure in cognitive tasks could affect different personalities differently; 3) ontogenetic changes of personality profiles could be reflected in changes in cog- nitive performance. The study of such interplay has implications in animal welfare as well as in neuroscience and in translational medicine (Current Zoology 57 (4): 491-498, 2011). Keywords Animal personality, Coping style, Cognition

Subfields: Genetics, Small Animals, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2c41013ed8c3c4625f26e54677540a9dfab37ba2

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Genetics

1. Christina M. Colvin
2. Culum Brown
3. L. Marino
4. Melanie Dammhahn

In Small Animals

1. Christina M. Colvin
2. Culum Brown
3. L. Marino

In Social Psychology

1. Christina M. Colvin
2. Culum Brown
3. S. Schoech
4. L. Marino
5. Melanie Dammhahn
6. Larissa Trompf

Citations in the corpus

• Thinking Pigs: A Comparative Review of Cognition, Emotion, and Personality in Sus domesticus (2015, background): “Personality studies of pigs are important for understanding what traits pigs share with other species, including humans, as well as for better understanding individual variability in cognitive performance (Carere & Locurto, 2011; Sih & Bell, 2008).”
• The fast and the flexible: cognitive style drives individual variation in cognition in a small mammal (2018, background): “Specifically, it has been proposed that behavioural types may be markers of different cognitive styles (Carere & Locurto, 2011; Sih & Del Giudice, 2012), defined as the specific strategies by which different individuals perform cognitive tasks (Bebus et al., 2016).”
• Personality affects learning and trade-offs between private and social information in guppies, Poecilia reticulata (2014, background): “Personality differences may affect cognitive style (reviewed in Carere & Locurto, 2011).”
• Associative learning is inversely related to reversal learning and varies with nestling corticosterone exposure (2016, background): “…ability is an individual's capability to acquire, process, store and use information, whereas cognitive style is the specific strategy by which the individual acquires, processes, stores and uses the information (Carere & Locurto, 2011; Griffin, Guillette, & Healy, 2015; Sih & Del Giudice, 2012).”