Meeting Abstract
Behavioral flexibility allows individuals to modify their behavior in response to novel or shifting environmental conditions. Despite the potential role of behavioral flexibility in natural populations, very few studies have tested hypotheses about behavioral flexibility in the field. Here we have developed an experimental paradigm to evaluate behavioral flexibility under natural conditions in wild, free-living lizards (Anolis sagrei). We presented these lizards with a series of tasks evaluating associative, spatial, or reversal learning. Our results show that a subset of lizards can solve each task and that they make fewer errors as they proceed through each task. These findings open the door to further evaluate the role of cognition in fitness in wild animal populations.
