Personality affects individual variation in olfactory learning and reversal learning in the house cricket, Achetadomesticus

Abstract

Growing evidence suggests that individual variation in learning is ubiquitous, but why this is the case and what the consequences are is still a subject of much debate and research. One key set of explanations for variation in learning behaviour is that it relates to variation in animal personality traits. If personality traits affect how an individual interacts with its environment or processes information, this could directly affect performance in learning tasks. While this idea is generally well supported, there are inconsistent results on the relationships between specific personality traits and performance on different learning tasks, highlighting the need to measure multiple personality traits and to quantify different aspects of learning in the same individuals. We examined the relationship between three putative personality traits – aggression, latency to emerge from a shelter and time to contact a novel object – and learning speed in both initial and reversal olfactory learning in the house cricket, Acheta domesticus . Crickets were assayed for each personality trait, then tested for their speed to associate an odour with a water reward. Both aggression and latency to emerge were significantly repeatable, but only latency to emerge was related to learning speed, with individuals that took longer to emerge from the shelter requiring fewer trials to reach the learning criterion for both the initial and reversal learning experiments. We also identified sex differences in learning speed in the different experiments. Thus, our results provide some support for a relationship between personality and learning in an invertebrate. • Individuals vary in learning ability, and personality may explain why this is. • Aggression and latency to emerge were repeatable personality traits in crickets. • Crickets successfully learned and reversal learned an olfactory association. • Learning speed was associated with latency to emerge. • Personality affects individual variation in learning speed in crickets.