Linking personality and cognition: a meta-analysis
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the past decade, several conceptual papers have linked variation in animal personality to variation in cognition, and recent years have seen a flood of empirical studies testing this link. However, these results have not been synthesized in a quantitative way. Here, we systematically search the literature and conduct a phylogenetically controlled meta-analysis of empirical papers that have tested the relationship between animal personality (exploration, boldness, activity, aggression and sociability) and cognition (initial learning/reversal speed, number of correct choices/errors after standard training). We find evidence for a small but significant relationship between variation in personality and variation in learning across species in the absolute scale; however, the direction of this relationship is highly variable and when both positive and negative effect sizes are considered, the average effect size does not differ significantly from zero. Importantly, this variation among studies is not explained by differences in personality or learning measure, or taxonomic grouping. Further, these results do not support current hypotheses suggesting that that fast-explorers are fast-learners or that slow-explorers perform better on tests of reversal learning. Rather, we find evidence that bold animals are faster learners, but only when boldness is measured in response to a predator (or simulated predator) and not when boldness is measured by exposure to a novel object (or novel food). Further, although only a small sub-sample of papers reported results separately for males and females, sex explained a significant amount of variation in effect size. These results, therefore, suggest that, while personality and learning are indeed related across a range of species, the direction of this relationship is highly variable. Thus further empirical work is needed to determine whether there are important moderators of this relationship. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Causes and consequences of individual differences in cognitive abilities’.
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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) | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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 it