Study On The Correlation Between Personality And Cognitive Ability Of Java Sparrows

Animal cognition has gradually become the focus of ecological research.Establishing whether cognition produces repeatable behaviour is crucial to reliably quantify cognitive variation in a population.To date,little attention has been paid to the consistency of cognition performance in non-human animals,and the results of a few studies on cognitive consistency are also very different.On the other hand,some studies have shown that both cognition and personality influence the speed of animals acquiring environmental cues,and they share the same risk–reward trade-offs,so the relationship between personality and cognition is a scientific issue worthy of further discussion.In birds,there are many types of cognitive tasks,so it is one-sided to connect cognition and personality through only one cognitive test.Whether cross-time consistency and cross-task consistency exists in avian cognitive and the correlation between avian personality and cognition are the scientific issues concerned in this study.First,the cognitive ability test was carried out,the test required tested birds passed the three tasks(colour task,colour reversal task and barrier task).In order to test the consistency of cognitive performance,cognitive tests were repeated after two weeks.Then the exploratory score of Java sparrows(Lonchura oryzivora)was measured in the new environment and new object,and the exploratory test was repeated three weeks later.Based on the above data,the correlation between exploration and cognitive ability of Java sparrows was analyzed.Since sex and body condition may affect cognitive performance,the study examined whether sex and body condition(weight/tarsus length)affect cognitive performance.The main results are as follows:1.After two weeks'interval,we repeated the tests mentioned above and found that colour task(R=0.324,N=30,P=0.038)was cross-time consistency in Java sparrows.The performance of Java sparrows in colour task and colour reversal task were cross-task consistency(R=0.465,N=30,P=0.004),while the performance in colour task and barrier task(R=0.166,N=30,P=0.185)and the performance in colour reversal task and barrier task(R=0.006,N=30,P=0.512)were not cross-task consistency.2.There was a significant positive correlation between the exploration and the performance of colour reversal task,that is,low-exploring individuals were faster to pass the colour reversal task(r _S=0.426,N=30,P=0.019).However,there were no relationship between exploration and cognitive performance in colour task(r _S=0.004,N=30,P=0.982)and barrier task(r _S=0.066,N=30,P=0.729).The above results show that:1.The cross-time consistency of the colour task's performance showed that the combination ability between food and environment is stable,which is very important for the survival and evolution of Java sparrows.The performance of colour task and colour reversal task was cross-task consistency,which shows that the neural mechanism controlling the combination ability between food and environment and the neural mechanism controlling flexibility may be related to a certain extent.2.The relationship between personality and cognitive ability was affected by the type of cognitive task.Low-exploring individuals were faster to pass the colour reversal task,indicating that low-exploring individuals may be more flexible,that is,they adapted to the new environment as soon as possible when the external environmental stimuli change.