Data from: Do detour tasks provide accurate assays of inhibitory control?

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 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 Tasks (PICTs). Improvements in performance across trials showed that pheasants learned the affordances of each specific task. Critically, prior experience of transparent tasks, either barrier or cylinder, also improved subsequent inhibitory control performance on a novel task, suggesting that they also learned the general properties of transparent obstacles. Individual measures of persistence, assayed in a third task, were positively related to their frequency of incorrect attempts to solve the transparent inhibitory control tasks. Neophobia, sex and body condition had no influence on individual performance. Contrary to previous studies of primates, pheasants with poor performance on PICTs had a wider dietary breadth assayed using a free-choice task. Our results demonstrate that in systems or taxa where prior experience and differences in development cannot be accounted for, individual differences in performance on commonly used detour-dependent PICTS may reveal more about an individual’s prior experience of transparent objects, or their motivation to acquire food, than providing a reliable measure of their inhibitory control.

透明圆筒任务与障碍任务据称被用于评估多种动物的抑制控制（inhibitory control）能力。然而，我们推测，这类迂回任务的作业表现会受到非认知特质的影响，这可能导致抑制控制的评估结果不够准确。为此，我们在标准化饲养条件下繁育雉鸡，并为每只受试个体提供两套常用于测量抑制控制的相似任务。我们记录了受试个体试图通过透明障碍获取奖励的错误尝试次数，以及完成每项任务的潜伏期。这类指标常被用于推断抑制控制的差异化表达。我们发现，几乎没有证据表明受试个体在两项不同的假定抑制控制任务（Putative Inhibitory Control Tasks, PICTs）中的表现具有一致性。随着试验次数增加，个体的作业表现有所提升，这说明雉鸡能够学习到每项特定任务的可供性（affordances）。尤为关键的是，无论是障碍任务还是圆筒任务的前置经验，均能提升受试个体在后续新颖任务中的抑制控制类作业表现，这表明它们也能够学习到透明障碍物的通用属性。在第三项任务中测得的个体持久性指标，与其在透明抑制控制任务中的错误尝试频率呈正相关。新异恐惧症（neophobia）、性别与身体状况对个体作业表现并无影响。与此前针对灵长类的研究结果相反，在假定抑制控制任务中表现较差的雉鸡，在自由选择饮食任务中测得的食性广度更广。我们的研究结果表明，在那些无法控制前置经验与发育差异的研究系统或类群中，基于迂回任务的常用假定抑制控制任务的个体表现差异，或许更多反映的是个体对透明物体的过往经验，或是其获取食物的动机，而非可靠的抑制控制能力测量指标。