Meier Christina, Pant Sara Raj, van Horik Jayden O, Laker Philippa R, Langley Ellis J G, Whiteside Mark A, Verbruggen Frederick, Madden Joah R
School of Psychology, University of Exeter, Washington Singer Laboratories, Exeter, EX4 4QG, UK.
Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
Anim Cogn. 2017 Nov;20(6):1035-1047. doi: 10.1007/s10071-017-1120-8. Epub 2017 Aug 9.
Inhibitory control enables subjects to quickly react to unexpectedly changing external demands. We assessed the ability of young (8 weeks old) pheasants Phasianus colchicus to exert inhibitory control in a novel response-inhibition task that required subjects to adjust their movement in space in pursuit of a reward across changing target locations. The difference in latencies between trials in which the target location did and did not change, the distance travelled towards the initially indicated location after a change occurred, and the change-signal reaction time provided a consistent measure that could be indicative of a pheasant's inhibitory control. Between individuals, there was a great variability in these measures; these differences were not correlated with motivation either to access the reward or participate in the test. However, individuals that were slower to reach rewards in trials when the target did not change exhibited evidence of stronger inhibitory control, as did males and small individuals. This novel test paradigm offers a potential assay of inhibitory control that utilises a natural feature of an animal's behavioural repertoire, likely common to a wide range of species, specifically their ability to rapidly alter their trajectory when reward locations switch.
抑制控制使个体能够对意外变化的外部需求做出快速反应。我们评估了8周龄雏雉鸡（雉鸡）在一项新颖的反应抑制任务中施加抑制控制的能力，该任务要求个体在不断变化的目标位置中调整其在空间中的运动以获取奖励。目标位置改变和未改变的试验之间的潜伏期差异、目标位置改变后朝着最初指示位置行进的距离以及变化信号反应时间提供了一个一致的指标，该指标可能表明雉鸡的抑制控制能力。个体之间，这些指标存在很大差异；这些差异与获取奖励的动机或参与测试的动机均无关联。然而，在目标未改变的试验中获取奖励较慢的个体表现出更强的抑制控制能力，雄性个体和体型较小的个体也是如此。这种新颖的测试范式提供了一种潜在的抑制控制测定方法，该方法利用了动物行为库中的一个自然特征，这可能是广泛物种所共有的，特别是它们在奖励位置切换时快速改变轨迹的能力。
