Individual variation in behavior and cognition is underpinned by variation in neural decision-making mechanisms, which are subject to the varied ecological pressures individuals experience. The highly social African cichlid fish Astatotilapia burtoni forms dynamic dominance hierarchies where males transition between dominant (colorful, aggressive, territorial) and subordinate (reproductively repressed, non-territorial) phenotypes. Social ascent in this species induces a cascade of rapid behavioral, physiological, and neuromolecular changes. A. burtoni displays complex cognition that allows both males and females to navigate this fast-paced social world. Here, we ask whether social ascent affects cognitive performance and/or the behaviors exhibited during cognitive tasks. Because systematic cognitive testing has not been done in this species, we first assessed males and females in two cognitive tasks: a novel object recognition task and a spatial task. We found that novel object preference and likelihood to meet the spatial task learning differed between the sexes. Furthermore, the sexes differed in space use in both tasks, and multivariate analyses uncovered relationships between behavior, age, and sex both within and across tasks. Next, we perturbed each community in a manner that provided males with the opportunity to ascend in status and subsequently subjected them to the two tasks described above. This allowed us to compare cognitive performance and behavior across timepoints of social ascent. Ongoing work examines the neuromolecular mechanisms that integrate social behavior and cognition. This work highlights the need to explicitly test across multiple tasks and social contexts to better understand how individuals make decisions in dynamic social environments.