Meier Christina, Lea Stephen E G, McLaren Ian P L
University of Exeter, Exeter, UK.
Learn Behav. 2020 Mar;48(1):149-164. doi: 10.3758/s13420-019-00403-7.
Inhibitory control enables subjects to quickly react to unexpected changes in external demands. In humans, this kind of behavioral flexibility is often used as an indicator of an individual's executive functions, and more and more research has emerged to investigate this link in nonhuman animals as well. Here we explored the value of a recently developed continuous inhibitory-control task in assessing inhibitory-control capacities in animals. Pigeons completed a response-inhibition task that required them to adjust their movement in space in pursuit of a reward across changing target locations. Inhibition was measured in terms of movement trajectory (path taken toward the correct location for trials in which the target location did and did not change) and velocity (both before and after correcting the trajectory toward the changed location). Although the observed velocities did not follow any of our predictions in a clear way, the pigeons' movement trajectories did prove to be a good indicator of inhibitory control, showing that pigeons, though limited in their capacities relative to the sophisticated control strategies expressed by humans, are capable of exerting some forms of inhibitory control. These results strengthen the role of this paradigm as a valuable tool for evaluating inhibitory-control abilities across the animal kingdom.
抑制控制使个体能够对外部需求的意外变化迅速做出反应。在人类中，这种行为灵活性常被用作个体执行功能的指标，并且越来越多的研究也开始探究非人类动物中的这种联系。在此，我们探讨了一种最近开发的连续抑制控制任务在评估动物抑制控制能力方面的价值。鸽子完成了一项反应抑制任务，该任务要求它们在空间中调整动作，以在不断变化的目标位置中获取奖励。抑制通过运动轨迹（在目标位置改变和未改变的试验中朝着正确位置所采取的路径）和速度（在朝着改变后的位置校正轨迹之前和之后）来衡量。尽管观察到的速度并没有以任何清晰的方式遵循我们的预测，但鸽子的运动轨迹确实被证明是抑制控制的一个良好指标，这表明鸽子虽然相对于人类所表现出的复杂控制策略而言能力有限，但仍能够施加某种形式的抑制控制。这些结果强化了这种范式作为评估整个动物界抑制控制能力的宝贵工具的作用。
