Cognition, personality, and stress in budgerigars, Melopsittacus undulatus.

ABSTRACT: 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 acros

SUBMITTER: Medina-Garcia A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5872908 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Nov-Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature