Abstract
The relationship between an individual’s cognitive abilities and other behavioural attributes is complex, yet critical to understanding how individual differences in cognition arise. Here we use western mosquitofish, Gambusia affinis, to investigate the relationship between individual associative learning performance in numerical discrimination tests and independent measures of activity, exploration, anxiety and sociability. We found extensive and highly repeatable inter-individual variation in learning performance (r = 0.89; ICC = 0.89). Males and females exhibited similar learning performance, yet differed in sociability, activity and their relationship between learning and anxiety/exploration tendencies. Sex-specific multivariate behaviour scores successfully predicted variation in individual learning performance, whereas combined sex analyses did not. Female multivariate behaviour scores significantly predict learning performance across females (ρ = 0.80, p = 0.005) with high-performing female learners differentiated from female non-learners and low-performing learners by significant contributions of activity and sociability measures. Meanwhile, males of different learning performance levels (high-, low- and non-learners) were distinguished from each other by unique behavioural loadings of sociability, activity and anxiety/exploration scores, respectively. Our data suggest that despite convergence on learning performance, the sexes diverge in cognitive–behavioural relationships that are likely products of different sexual selection pressures.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the many undergraduates who assisted in this project including Rachel Ellerd, Patricia Phillips, Omar Mohammad, Chris Monty, Matt Milam, and Ashton Berger; and the very helpful comments and assistance from all Cummings’ laboratory members.
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Figure S1
Behavioural consistency measured as correlations across (a) learning assays, (b) activity, (c), anxiety behaviour—thigmoatixs black and latency to enter white side, (d) sociality, (e) thigmotaxis behaviour, (f) exploritory behaviour—thigmotaxis white and scototaxis (PDF 2584 kb)
Figure S2
Generalised canonical discrimination plot for all behavioural assays. Entries into white (DFA1: r = 0.27, p = 0.27), scototaxis (DFA1: r = 0.03, p = 0.91), thigmotaxis numerosity (DFA1: r = 0.17, p = 0.48), thigmotaxis black(DFA1: r = 0.35, p = 0.13), thigmotaxis white (DFA1: r = 0.15, p = 0.53), latency to enter white side (DFA1: r = 0.32, p = 0.18), sociality (DFA1: r = 0.86, p = 2.03e−06), activity (DFA1: r = 0.17, p = 0.47). DFA1 axis showed a nonsignificant correlation with learning performance (r = 0.26, p = 0.28) (PDF 2212 kb)
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Etheredge, R.I., Avenas, C., Armstrong, M.J. et al. Sex-specific cognitive–behavioural profiles emerging from individual variation in numerosity discrimination in Gambusia affinis . Anim Cogn 21, 37–53 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-017-1134-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-017-1134-2