SynthesisPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2018
Linking personality and cognition: a meta-analysis.
Synthesis in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 96 papers, 4 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
96 citing papers in PubMed, 4 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- What do zebra finches learn besides singing? Systematic mapping of the literature and presentation of an efficient associative learning test.Animal cognition · 2023Pooled it
- A meta-analysis on the evolution of the Lombard effect reveals that amplitude adjustments are a widespread vertebrate mechanism.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Pooled it
- Species sensitivities to a global pollutant: A meta-analysis on acoustic signals in response to anthropogenic noise.Global change biology · 2021Pooled it
- The repeatability of cognitive performance: a meta-analysis.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Pooled it
- Repeatedly unreliable, and unreliably repeatable: the trials-to-criterion fallacy.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Predation risk is associated with head-size-related divergence in breeding phenology in a female sea duck.Oecologia · 2026Article
- Could Spatial Learning in the Early Stages of Life Consistently Affect the Long-Term Memory of Leopard Geckos (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Article
- A standardized personality lexicon for enhancing personalized human-machine interaction.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Simple life, simple minds? How habitat simplification in aquatic ecosystems shape fish cognition.Animal cognition · 2026Review
- Unpacking response Inhibition in animals - part 2: an empirical test.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Article
- Smart Ungulates: What Sheep and Goats' Performances in a Reversed-Reward Contingency Task Tell Us About the Evolution of Cognitive Flexibility.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Three distinct components of pragmatic language use: Social conventions, intonation, and world knowledge-based causal reasoning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Personality, Stereotypy, and Responses to Crate Entry in Captive Giant Pandas.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Embodied Cognition and the Structure of Personality: An Exploratory Study of Longitudinal Pathways From Early Psychomotor Function.Journal of personality · 2025Article
- Beyond criterion: cognitive flexibility in wild striated caracaras.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Linking Personality and Performance in California Sea Lions (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- A cognitive multiplex network approach to investigate mental navigation and predict high-level cognition.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Demonstrating the reproductive consequences of cognition: learning from experience.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Does the Post-Natal Social Environment Influence Cognitive Development in a Social Gecko?Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
36 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
In the past decade, several conceptual papers have linked variation in animal personality to variation in cognition, and recent years have seen a flood of empirical studies testing this link. However, these results have not been synthesized in a quantitative way. Here, we systematically search the literature and conduct a phylogenetically controlled meta-analysis of empirical papers that have tested the relationship between animal personality (exploration, boldness, activity, aggression and sociability) and cognition (initial learning/reversal speed, number of correct choices/errors after standard training). We find evidence for a small but significant relationship between variation in personality and variation in learning across species in the absolute scale; however, the
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.