Breadcrumb
The evolution and maintenance of personalities in animal populations
Supervisor: John McNamara, FRS
Theme: Behavioural Biology
Individual humans, and members of diverse other species, show consistent differences in aggressiveness, shyness, sociability and activity. Such intra-specific differences in behaviour may be due to non-adaptive variation surrounding (possibly) adaptive population-average behaviour. Alternatively such 'personality differences' can be selected for if fitness payoffs are dependent on both the frequencies with which competing strategies are played and an individual's behavioural history. In this project these idea will be explored through the construction of appropriate models. These will be analysed using techniques from evolutionary game theory and optimal stochastic control. The motivation is to provide insights into the evolution and maintenance of an apparently common animal trait: personality.