Evidence map›Paper›PMID 33708004›Full record

ReviewBehavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology

Task syndromes: linking personality and task allocation in social animal groups.

J C Loftus, A A Perez, A Sih

Erratum issuedOpen access · hybridAbstract readReview
In one paragraph

Review in Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 7 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
7citing papers in PubMed
10.1field-weighted citation impact, top 2% of its field
1 · What the graph read from 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.

2 · The registry

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.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

7 citing papers in PubMed, 44 citations in OpenAlex.

  1. Article
  2. Multi-level societies: different tasks at different social levels.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025
    Article
  3. The evolution of division of labour: preconditions and evolutionary feedback.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025
    Review
  4. Article
  5. Mechanisms of collective learning: how can animal groups improve collective performance when repeating a task?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023
    Review
  6. Review
  7. Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.

J C LoftusDepartment of Anthropology, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA, USA.ORCID 0000-0002-0723-9159
A A PerezDepartment of Entomology, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA, USA.ORCID 0000-0002-0808-569X
A SihDepartment of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA, USA.ORCID 0000-0001-6161-1663
University of California, Davis · USUniversity of Konstanz · DE

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Studies of eusocial insects have extensively investigated two components of task allocation: how individuals distribute themselves among different tasks in a colony and how the distribution of labor changes to meet fluctuating task demand. While discrete age- and morphologically-based task allocation systems explain much of the social order in these colonies, the basis for task allocation in non-eusocial organisms and within eusocial castes remains unknown. Building from recent advances in the study of among-individual variation in behavior (i.e., animal personalities), we explore a potential mechanism by which individuality in behaviors unrelated to tasks can guide the developmental trajectories that lead to task specialization. We refer to the task-based behavioral syndrome that results from the correlation between the antecedent behavioral tendencies and task participation as a task syndrome. In this review, we present a framework that integrates concepts from a long history of task allocation research in eusocial organisms with recent findings from animal personality research to elucidate how task syndromes and resulting task allocation might manifest in animal groups. By drawing upon an extensive and diverse literature to evaluate the hypothesized framework, this review identifies future areas for study at the intersection of social behavior and animal personality.

Indexed as

division of laborpersonalitysocial behaviortask allocation

Identifiers

PMID33708004
PMCPMC7937036
OpenAlexW3127132629

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

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.