Individual differences in anxiety are related to differences in learning performance and cognitive style

Abstract

Individuals of the same population differ in their cognitive abilities, that is, in their capacity to acquire, process, store and act on information from the environment. The question of whether individuals with different personality types differ in their learning performances has been commonly addressed but has yielded mixed results. We propose that methodological differences among studies might have contributed to these contrasting results. Notably, the strength and direction of the association between personality and learning might be affected by which personality traits are considered and how they are measured. To test this hypothesis, we conducted an experiment with sailfin mollies, Poecilia latipinna. We assessed three personality traits that are likely to affect individuals’ performance by influencing either their willingness to encounter the new situation (i.e. exploration and neophobia) or their susceptibility or emotional reactivity to stressful situations (i.e. anxiety). Then, we scored their performance in two learning tasks (i.e. discrimination and spatial reversal learning) after they had been extensively familiarized with the learning device and hence were all willing to encounter the task. We found that only anxiety had a significant effect on learning performance, with less anxious fish performing better in the discrimination learning task but worse in the spatial reversal task than highly anxious ones. Thus, our findings confirm a link between personality and cognition and are consistent with the idea that learning requires different steps that are each associated with different personality traits. Furthermore, highly anxious fish, on average, needed more trials to learn an association but some of them (with presumably high energetic requirements) consistently took more time before making a choice and had higher performance than their counterparts that made faster decisions.