The inhibitory control of pheasants (Phasianus colchicus) weakens when previously learned environmental information becomes unpredictable.

ABSTRACT: Inhibitory control (IC) is the ability to intentionally restrain initial, ineffective responses to a stimulus and instead exhibit an alternative behaviour that is not pre-potent but which effectively attains a reward. Individuals (both humans and non-human animals) differ in their IC, perhaps as a result of the different environmental conditions they have experienced. We experimentally manipulated environmental predictability, specifically how reliable information linking a cue to a reward was, over a very short time period and tested how this affected an individual's IC. We gave 119 pheasants (Phasianus colchicus) the opportunity to learn to associate a visual cue with a food reward in a binary choice task. We then perturbed this association for half the birds, whereas control birds conti

SUBMITTER: Griffin KR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6981107 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature