Does personality affect the ability of individuals to track and respond to changing conditions?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".