Individual Variation In Information and Its Use

Abstract

Individuals within a population can vary in the way that they acquire, store, and act on information from the environment. Researchers have commonly looked at differences in genetic architecture, physical environment, or personality as possible causes of individual variation in cognition. Though cognition is defined as a suite of mechanisms involving the processing of information, we have yet to asses information (i.e. a numerical measure of the uncertainty of an outcome) as a possible cause of individual variation in cognition. This thesis seeks to understand the causes of individual variation in cognition by using approaches that allow quantifying and/or manipulating information acquisition or its use. In Chapter 1, I look at the link between information gathering and exploratory personality by testing the correlation between activity in a novel environment and attraction to novelty in wild-caught black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus). My results validate exploratory personality assessed in an open field test as a measure of information gathering. Fast exploration of a novel environment was positively correlated with novelty seeking, suggesting that exploration is an information gathering strategy. In Chapter 2, I test for experience with informative vs non-informative cues as a cause for individual differences in decision making and learning performance. Here, I manipulated the informational properties (i.e. presence and number of reliable cues) of the developmental environment of juvenile captive zebra finches (Taenopygia guttata). This rare longitudinal and experimental examination of the effect of informative versus non-informative cues during development suggests that experience with informative cues can cause increased discrimination learning accuracy and decision-making speed later in life. Finally, in Chapter 3 I looked into individual variation in information use and decision making using a game theoretic approach. Using a producer-scrounger game, groups of zebra finches were exposed to varying seed distributions. Individual strategy choice in a social-foraging game was not significantly correlated with an individual’s experience with informative cues or learning performance. Still, contrary to my predictions, fear response significantly predicted strategy choice where more fearful individuals were more likely to choose a producer strategy. By addressing information as a parameter, my results suggest that information can affect individual variation depending on context.