Do detour tasks provide accurate assays of inhibitory control?

ABSTRACT: Transparent Cylinder and Barrier tasks are used to purportedly assess inhibitory control in a variety of animals. However, we suspect that performances on these detour tasks are influenced by non-cognitive traits, which may result in inaccurate assays of inhibitory control. We therefore reared pheasants under standardized conditions and presented each bird with two sets of similar tasks commonly used to measure inhibitory control. We recorded the number of times subjects incorrectly attempted to access a reward through transparent barriers, and their latencies to solve each task. Such measures are commonly used to infer the differential expression of inhibitory control. We found little evidence that their performances were consistent across the two different Putative Inhibitory Control Tas

SUBMITTER: van Horik JO 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5897648 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature