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Long-term repeatability of cognitive performance

Measures of cognitive performance, derived from psychometric tasks, have yielded important insights into the factors governing cognitive variation. However, concerns remain over the robustness of these measures, which may be susceptible to non-cognitive factors such as motivation and persistence. Ef...

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Autores principales: Ashton, Benjamin J., Thornton, Alex, Cauchoix, Maxime, Ridley, Amanda R.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: The Royal Society 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9128854/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35620015
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.220069
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author Ashton, Benjamin J.
Thornton, Alex
Cauchoix, Maxime
Ridley, Amanda R.
author_facet Ashton, Benjamin J.
Thornton, Alex
Cauchoix, Maxime
Ridley, Amanda R.
author_sort Ashton, Benjamin J.
collection PubMed
description Measures of cognitive performance, derived from psychometric tasks, have yielded important insights into the factors governing cognitive variation. However, concerns remain over the robustness of these measures, which may be susceptible to non-cognitive factors such as motivation and persistence. Efforts to quantify short-term repeatability of cognitive performance have gone some way to address this, but crucially the long-term repeatability of cognitive performance has been largely overlooked. Quantifying the long-term repeatability of cognitive performance provides the opportunity to determine the stability of cognitive phenotypes and the potential for selection to act on them. To this end, we quantified long-term repeatability of cognitive performance in wild Australian magpies over a three-year period. Cognitive performance was repeatable in two out of four cognitive tasks—associative learning and reversal-learning performance was repeatable, but spatial memory and inhibitory control performance, although trending toward significance, was not. Measures of general cognitive performance, obtained from principal components analyses carried out on each cognitive test battery, were highly repeatable. Together, these findings provide evidence that at least some cognitive phenotypes are stable, which in turn has important implications for our understanding of cognitive evolution.
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spelling pubmed-91288542022-05-25 Long-term repeatability of cognitive performance Ashton, Benjamin J. Thornton, Alex Cauchoix, Maxime Ridley, Amanda R. R Soc Open Sci Organismal and Evolutionary Biology Measures of cognitive performance, derived from psychometric tasks, have yielded important insights into the factors governing cognitive variation. However, concerns remain over the robustness of these measures, which may be susceptible to non-cognitive factors such as motivation and persistence. Efforts to quantify short-term repeatability of cognitive performance have gone some way to address this, but crucially the long-term repeatability of cognitive performance has been largely overlooked. Quantifying the long-term repeatability of cognitive performance provides the opportunity to determine the stability of cognitive phenotypes and the potential for selection to act on them. To this end, we quantified long-term repeatability of cognitive performance in wild Australian magpies over a three-year period. Cognitive performance was repeatable in two out of four cognitive tasks—associative learning and reversal-learning performance was repeatable, but spatial memory and inhibitory control performance, although trending toward significance, was not. Measures of general cognitive performance, obtained from principal components analyses carried out on each cognitive test battery, were highly repeatable. Together, these findings provide evidence that at least some cognitive phenotypes are stable, which in turn has important implications for our understanding of cognitive evolution. The Royal Society 2022-05-24 /pmc/articles/PMC9128854/ /pubmed/35620015 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.220069 Text en © 2022 The Authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Organismal and Evolutionary Biology
Ashton, Benjamin J.
Thornton, Alex
Cauchoix, Maxime
Ridley, Amanda R.
Long-term repeatability of cognitive performance
title Long-term repeatability of cognitive performance
title_full Long-term repeatability of cognitive performance
title_fullStr Long-term repeatability of cognitive performance
title_full_unstemmed Long-term repeatability of cognitive performance
title_short Long-term repeatability of cognitive performance
title_sort long-term repeatability of cognitive performance
topic Organismal and Evolutionary Biology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9128854/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35620015
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.220069
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