Symposium number: 01

Title: AVIAN PERSONALITIES

Principal organizer: Claudio Carere
Center for Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology, Behavioural Endocrinology Research Group, University of Liège, 17 Place Delcour B 4020 Liège, Belgium
email: C.Carere@ulg.ac.be

Second organizer: Irene M. Pepperberg
Brandeis University, Dept. of Psychology, Waltham, MA 02454, USA

First keynote speaker: Piet J. Drent
Netherlands Institute of Ecology, P.O. Box 40, 6666 ZG, Heteren, The Netherlands
Title of first keynote paper: Avian personalities: the Great Tit story

Second keynote speaker: Irene M. Pepperberg
Brandeis University, Dept. of Psychology, Waltham, MA 02454, USA
Title of second keynote paper: Behavioural Differences in Grey Parrots: Studies on Cognition and Communication

Contributed talks

Symposium description: Individuals of the same species and sex have behavioural and physiological differences, even in standard conditions. In humans, many of these differences are treated as expressions of individual variation in personality. Yet in other animals, such explanations have often been neglected, the differences interpreted instead as either the consequence of inaccurate measurements or as non adaptive variation around an adaptive mean.
Recent studies in birds suggest that animal personality can be studied objectively. Such work has used four approaches in parallel: (1) descriptive ‘longitudinal’ studies, including the investigation of links among several behaviours and their specificity across situations, (2) genetic and physiological research on causal mechanisms underlying relations among several behaviours of the same profile, (3) ontogenetic studies on plasticity and environmental malleability, and (4) field studies on survival and reproduction towards understanding how different types of personality are maintained.
This symposium addresses this research and its implications. So far, results indicate that different personality types may react differently to identical experimental treatments and may show differential vulnerability to stress, leading to differences in welfare. Ultimately, such differences can have major impacts on individual fitness, response to environmental change, geographic distribution, and even rates of speciation.

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