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.