Learning and Personality Types Are Related in Cavies (Cavia aperea) Anja Guenther, Vera Brust, Mona Dersen, and Fritz Trillmich Bielefeld University The evolution and maintenance of consistent individual differences, so called animal personalities, have attracted much research interest over the past decades. Variation along common personality traits, such as boldness or exploration, is often associated with risk–reward trade-offs. Individuals that are bolder and hence take more risks may be more successful in acquiring resources over the short term. Cautious individuals taking fewer risks may, on the other hand, live longer, but may also gather fewer resources over the short term. According to recent theory, individual differences in personality may be functionally related to individual differences in cognitive performance (i.e., the way in which individuals acquire or use information). Individual differences in the acquisition speed of cognitively challenging tasks are often associated with a speed–accuracy trade-off. Accuracy can be improved by investing more time in the decision-making process or, conversely, decisions can be made more quickly at the cost of making more mistakes. Hence, the speed–accuracy trade-off often involves a risk–reward trade-off. We tested whether 3 personality traits, boldness, activity, and aggressiveness, are correlated with individual learning, associative learning speed, and behavioral flexibility as assessed by reversal learning in wild cavies (Cavia aperea). We found strong positive relationships between all personality traits and learning speed, whereas flexibility was negatively associated with aggressiveness. Our results support the hypothesis that performance reflects indi- vidual differences in personality in a predictable way. Keywords: animal personalities, cognition, cognitive types, speed–accuracy trade-off Consistent individual differences across contexts and over time, so called personalities, have been documented in a wide range of animal taxa (Bell, Hankison, & Laskowski, 2009; Gosling, 2001; Sih, Bell, & Johnson, 2004). Individuals often have been found to differ in traits such as boldness, exploration, activity, or aggressiveness, which are all strongly associated with behaviors in ecological contexts (Réale, Reader, Sol, Mc- dougall, & Dingemanse, 2007). For example, sticklebacks that are bold in the presence of predators tend to be more aggressive toward conspecifics (Bell, 2005) and spiders that defend a territory more vigorously tend to be more active in foraging tasks (Riechert & Hedrick, 1993). Theory suggests that individual variation along these so- called personality axes is related to individual variation in life history (Biro & Stamps, 2008; Réale et al., 2010). Individuals that take more risks (i.e., are bolder) and are more explorative or aggressive may be more successful in acquiring food re- sources or getting access to mates over the short term. Cautious individuals, on the other hand, that are slow exploring, shy, and nonaggressive may be safer from predation but gather fewer resources in the short term, indicating a risk–reward trade-off. In species in which activity, aggressiveness, and/or boldness are positively related to food intake rates, these behavioral traits also contribute to the life history trade-off between growth, fecundity, and mortality. High rates of activity or boldness lead to higher productivity but at the same time reduce longevity in several small vertebrate species (for review, see Biro & Stamps, 2008). More active mice, for example, grow faster and reach maturation earlier than less active mice (Wirth-Dzieciołlowska & Czumi´ nska, 2000). In some long-lived mammal species, however, in which activity is not likely to be related to fecun- dity, the opposite relationship between activity and longevity was found (Weiss, Gartner, Gold, & Stoinski, 2013). Only recently, Sih and Del Giudice (2012) postulated that indi- vidual differences in personality types could be functionally re- lated to individual differences in cognitive types because both might share the same risk–reward trade-offs (Mathot, Wright, Kempenaers, & Dingemanse, 2012). Cognitive types refer to the way individuals acquire, store, or use information, independent of their cognitive ability (Gruszka, Matthews, & Szymura, 2009). Individual differences in acquisition speed and participation rates in cognitively challenging tasks have only recently attracted ex- plicit attention (Herrmann & Call, 2012; Morton, Lee, & Buchanan-Smith, 2013; Thornton & Lukas, 2012) but are known to be present in a number of species (e.g., Boogert, Giraldeau, & Lefebvre, 2008; Range, Bugnyar, Schlögl, & Kotrschal, 2006; Anja Guenther, Department of Behavioural Biology, Bielefeld Univer- sity, Bielefeld, Germany; Vera Brust, Department of Animal Behaviour, Bielefeld University; Mona Dersen and Fritz Trillmich, Department of Behavioural Biology, Bielefeld University. We thank Claudia Müller, Marie-Antonine Finkemeier, and Nele Heit- land for practical help during the experimental phase, as well as Josep Call, Alexander Weiss, Lee Drickamer, Josep Hoffman, and one anonymous reviewer for valuable comments on versions of this article. This work was supported by Grant FOR 1232, TR105/25–1 from the Deutsche For- schungsgemeinschaft. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Anja Guenther, Department of Behavioural Biology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany. E-mail: anja.guenther@uni-bielefeld.de This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. Journal of Comparative Psychology © 2013 American Psychological Association 2013, Vol. 127, No. 3, 000 0735-7036/13/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0033678 1