Cognitive variation in threespined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus)
type: CreativeWork
description: Cognition encompasses important mechanisms with which animals are able to adjust their behavior in response to environmental cues. These cognitive processes play a clear role in many fitness-related behaviors such as foraging, predator avoidance, and courtship. Thus, how these processes have evolved are of key scientific interest. Historically, research on the evolution of cognitive traits has largely focused on variation between species. However, particularly in the last couple of decades, there has been increasing interest in examining variation in cognition within a species. These studies no longer look at intraspecific variation as noise, but see it as being potentially adaptive and therefore impacting evolutionary trajectories. Yet, while many of these studies seemingly demonstrate the benefits of different cognitive traits, this has inevitably led to questions about why intraspecific variation is maintained. How costly are these traits? Are there trade-offs that maintain variation? The aim of the research in this dissertation is to study the mechanisms that drive and maintain intraspecific variation in cognition in threespined sticklebacks. This is done from four different angles. First, I tested the hypothesis that learning is part of an overall suite of correlated traits related to how an individual copes with changes in the environment, and that trade-offs between early learning and responsiveness to changes in learning outcomes may maintain cognitive variation. I found that individuals that showed a higher cortisol stress response and that were more reactive to a predatory threat were slower to learn a novel discrimination task, but not necessarily faster to respond when learning conditions changed. Second, I tested the hypothesis that sticklebacks from populations inhabiting different environments are primed to learn different cue associations faster within novel learning conditions. When individuals from two separate populations were trained on either a …
abstract: Cognition encompasses important mechanisms with which animals are able to adjust their behavior in response to environmental cues. These cognitive processes play a clear role in many fitness-related behaviors such as foraging, predator avoidance, and courtship. Thus, how these processes have evolved are of key scientific interest. Historically, research on the evolution of cognitive traits has largely focused on variation between species. However, particularly in the last couple of decades, there has been increasing interest in examining variation in cognition within a species. These studies no longer look at intraspecific variation as noise, but see it as being potentially adaptive and therefore impacting evolutionary trajectories. Yet, while many of these studies seemingly demonstrate the benefits of different cognitive traits, this has inevitably led to questions about why intraspecific variation is maintained. How costly are these traits? Are there trade-offs that maintain variation? The aim of the research in this dissertation is to study the mechanisms that drive and maintain intraspecific variation in cognition in threespined sticklebacks. This is done from four different angles. First, I tested the hypothesis that learning is part of an overall suite of correlated traits related to how an individual copes with changes in the environment, and that trade-offs between early learning and responsiveness to changes in learning outcomes may maintain cognitive variation. I found that individuals that showed a higher cortisol stress response and that were more reactive to a predatory threat were slower to learn a novel discrimination task, but not necessarily faster to respond when learning conditions changed. Second, I tested the hypothesis that sticklebacks from populations inhabiting different environments are primed to learn different cue associations faster within novel learning conditions. When individuals from two separate populations were trained on either a …
author: Bensky, Miles Kuiling
language: en
keywords: animal cognition, learning, discrimination learning, reversal learning, behavioral inhibition, flexibility, intraspecific variation, individual differences, personality, cognitive ecology, behavior, threespined stickleback, Gasterosteus aculeatus, fish
date published: 2019-11-26T20:34:59Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:44Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/105666