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Culum Brown, PhD

Personality

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Full-Text Articles in Organisms

Personality Affects Learning And Trade-Offs Between Private And Social Information In Guppies, Poecilia Reticulate, Larissa Trompf, Culum Brown May 2016

Personality Affects Learning And Trade-Offs Between Private And Social Information In Guppies, Poecilia Reticulate, Larissa Trompf, Culum Brown

Culum Brown, PhD

The acquisition of information such as the location and quality of food, mates or shelter is a key survival requirement for animals. Individuals can acquire information through personal experience (private information) or through observing and interacting with others (social information). Environmental spatial and temporal heterogeneity can mean that sometimes social information conflicts with private knowledge. We tested how personality affected the importance placed on public versus private information in wild female guppies when these two information sources came into conflict. We found that boldness and sociality affected decisions to use conflicting social and private information. Bolder females used social information …


Laterality Is Linked To Personality In The Black-Lined Rainbowfish, Melanotaenia Nigrans, Culum Brown, Anne-Laurence Bibost May 2016

Laterality Is Linked To Personality In The Black-Lined Rainbowfish, Melanotaenia Nigrans, Culum Brown, Anne-Laurence Bibost

Culum Brown, PhD

Emotions such as fear in vertebrates are often strongly lateralised, that is, a single cerebral hemisphere tends to be dominant when processing emotive stimuli. Boldness is a measure of an individual’s propensity to take risks and it has obvious connections with fear responses. Given the emotive nature of this well-studied personality trait, there is good reason to suspect that it is also likely to be expressed in a single hemisphere. Here, we examined the link between laterality and boldness in wild and captive-reared rainbowfish, Melanotaenia nigrans. We found that fish from the wild were bolder than those from captivity, which …