Heterogeneity of performances in several inhibitory control tasks: male rhesus macaques are more easily distracted than females

Loyant, L, Waller, BM ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6303-7458, Micheletta, J and Joly, M, 2021. Heterogeneity of performances in several inhibitory control tasks: male rhesus macaques are more easily distracted than females. Royal Society Open Science, 8 (11): 211564. ISSN 2054-5703

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Abstract

Inhibitory control, the ability to override a dominant response, is crucial in many aspects of everyday life. In animal studies, striking individual variations are often largely ignored and their causes rarely considered. Hence, our aims were to systematically investigate individual variability in inhibitory control, to replicate the most common causes of individual variation (age, sex and rank) and to determine if these factors had a consistent effect on three main components of inhibitory control (inhibition of a distraction, inhibition of an action, inhibition of a cognitive set). We tested 21 rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) in a battery of validated touchscreen tasks. We first found individual variations in all inhibitory control performances. We then demonstrated that males had poorer performances to inhibit a distraction and that middle-aged individuals exhibited poorer performance in the inhibition of a cognitive set. Hence, the factors of age and sex were not consistently associated with the main components of inhibitory control, suggesting a multi-faceted structure. The rank of the subjects did not influence any inhibitory control performances. This study adopts a novel approach for animal behaviour studies and gives new insight into the individual variability of inhibitory control which is crucial to understand its evolutionary underpinnings.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Royal Society Open Science
Creators:	Loyant, L., Waller, B.M., Micheletta, J. and Joly, M.
Publisher:	The Royal Society
Date:	November 2021
Volume:	8
Number:	11
ISSN:	2054-5703
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1098/rsos.211564 DOI 1498531 Other
Rights:	© 2021 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Laura Ward
Date Added:	03 Feb 2022 16:18
Last Modified:	03 Feb 2022 16:18
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/45516

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