Humans have the same personality as other people. According to new research published in the Royal Society Open Science journal, zebra finches have personality and some are consistent over the course of two years.
zebra finches innovated solutions to novel tasks, where sometimes success was related to personality type.
The article was written by a number of people, including the leader of the University of Wyoming and a number of people from other universities.
The zebra finches were tested for differences in behavior through time.
In the short term and long term, the authors used standardized personality tests to measure a host of characteristics.
The authors put a novel object in an enclosure with a bird that had been feeding and measured how long it took the bird to resume feeding in the presence of the novel object. The authors recorded the interactions of birds at a single feeders. The authors counted the number of escape attempts the birds made beneath a net to measure obstinacy.
"We were interested to see if personality would remain stable or if individuals would be more flexible in their behavior over time." We were able to answer that question by repeating our tests with the same birds.
Some of the traits were not the same as others. Only boldness and obstinacy were consistent over the course of two years.
Three novel tasks previously used with zebra finches were tested to see if personality relates to problem-solving success.
Marsh, who was an undergrad at the time, wanted to see if the two sources of variation were related.
Problem-solving success relates to boldness, dominance and obstinacy. Less dominant birds were more likely to solve two of the tasks. The "necessity drives innovation" hypothesis states that less dominant individuals may need to innovate new ways to access food because of competition with their flock mates.
"We used a comprehensive suite of personality tests and multiple cognitive tasks to carry out our work over a longer period of time than traditional tests." It allowed us to understand the link between personality and problem-solving.
The authors emphasize that future research should focus on uncovering which measures of personality are most important for innovation and why some are more plastic than others.
More information: Lisa P. Barrett et al, Links between personality traits and problem-solving performance in zebra finches ( Taeniopygia guttata ), Royal Society Open Science (2022). DOI: 10.1098/rsos.212001The videos from the study can be found at royalsocietypublishing.org.
Journal information: Royal Society Open Science
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