Dewulf Anneleen, Garcia-Co Clara, Müller Wendt, Madden Joah Robert, Martel An, Lens Luc, Verbruggen Frederick
Centre for Research on Ecology, Cognition and Behaviour of Birds, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
R Soc Open Sci. 2025 Jun 18;12(6):250316. doi: 10.1098/rsos.250316. eCollection 2025 Jun.
Response inhibition (RI), or the stopping of actions, is considered a key component of flexible and adaptive behaviour. Across fields, RI is often treated as a unitary cognitive mechanism. However, we propose that RI consists of a chain of cognitive processes, including the detection of a stimulus, the selection of an appropriate behaviour (go or stop) and the implementation of it (execution or inhibition of a motor response). From this, we propose that individual variation in RI can arise at the early signal detection stage. This idea was tested in a detour barrier task, which is one of the most popular tools to study RI in non-human animals. The role of signal detection in detour tasks has been largely neglected, with a few notable exceptions. We therefore partially replicated two previous studies that manipulated the perceptual characteristics of the barrier, while addressing some conceptual and methodological shortcomings of the original work. Specifically, we compared how detour performance of four bird species (i.e. white leghorn chickens, Japanese quails, herring gulls and domestic canaries) is differently influenced by vertical-bar (VB) and horizontal-bar (HB) barriers. In contrast to the previous work, performance on the detour task did not improve when the perceptual characteristics of the barrier matched the ecological niche of the species. However, all species showed some level of learning, as evidenced by shorter detour latencies (except in herring gulls) and fewer persisting attempts. These findings highlight the need for replication studies and emphasize the importance of improving methodological and conceptual design factors to further investigate the underlying mechanisms of RI in animals. Preregistered Stage 1 protocol: https://osf.io/qvxgh (date of in-principle acceptance: 20/03/2023).
反应抑制（RI），即动作的停止，被认为是灵活和适应性行为的关键组成部分。在各个领域，RI通常被视为一种单一的认知机制。然而，我们提出RI由一系列认知过程组成，包括刺激的检测、适当行为（前进或停止）的选择以及行为的实施（运动反应的执行或抑制）。据此，我们提出RI的个体差异可能出现在早期信号检测阶段。这一观点在迂回障碍任务中得到了验证，该任务是研究非人类动物RI最常用的工具之一。信号检测在迂回任务中的作用在很大程度上被忽视了，只有少数显著的例外。因此，我们部分重复了之前两项操纵障碍物感知特征的研究，同时解决了原始研究中的一些概念和方法上的不足。具体来说，我们比较了四种鸟类（即白来航鸡、日本鹌鹑、银鸥和家雀）在垂直条（VB）和水平条（HB）障碍物情况下迂回表现的差异。与之前的研究不同，当障碍物的感知特征与物种的生态位相匹配时，迂回任务的表现并没有提高。然而，所有物种都表现出了一定程度的学习，表现为迂回潜伏期缩短（银鸥除外）和持续尝试次数减少。这些发现凸显了重复研究的必要性，并强调了改进方法和概念设计因素对于进一步研究动物RI潜在机制的重要性。预注册的第一阶段方案：https://osf.io/qvxgh（原则上接受日期：2023年3月20日）。
