Meeting Abstract
Proactive and reactive coping styles describe the relationships among behavioral phenotypes (e.g., personality) and stress physiology, as well as consistent individual differences in cognition. Proactive individuals are hypothesized to be less sensitive to environmental cues and have relatively low hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis responsiveness to a stressor. In contrast, reactive individuals are more likely to detect and respond to subtle changes in the environment and respond to acute stressors with higher HPA axis activity. We explored the possible link between HPA axis responsiveness and the ability of free-living Florida scrub-jays (Aphelocoma coerulescens) to detect directional human gaze, a cognitive task. We tested whether scrub-jays exhibited consistent within-individual ability to detect human gaze by taking multiple measures of their willingness to approach a favorite food, peanuts, near a human that was facing toward or away from subjects. We also tested the ability of scrub-jays to detect subtle changes in a human’s gaze by measuring their willingness to approach peanuts near a human that gazed directly at or tangentially to subjects. Further, we compared the ability to detect directional gaze with levels of HPA axis responsiveness by measuring levels of corticosterone (the primary avian glucocorticoid) in response to a standardized stressor. Scrub-jays exhibited consistent within-individual ability to detect human gaze. Additionally, scrub-jays that responded to a standardized stressor with relatively high levels of corticosterone exhibited a higher degree of discrimination between the direct and tangential gaze of a human. These results support the hypothesis that high stress-response individuals are more sensitive to their environment, and further suggest that measures of cognitive ability may be influenced by cognitive style (i.e., how an individual focuses its attention).
