What We Can Learn From Horse Races: Response Inhibition Across Species

Verbruggen, Frederick · 2025 · Crossref

DOI: 10.5406/19398298.138.2.05

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Summary

This selective review addresses the extension of response inhibition research from human cognitive psychology to animal cognition, specifically highlighting the applicability of Gordon Logan’s independent horse race model. The author argues that response inhibition is a critical executive function supporting flexible behavior across taxa and that Logan’s theoretical frameworks offer a powerful tool for bridging human and animal studies. The paper aims to demonstrate how these models can refine the interpretation of behavioral data in ecological and evolutionary contexts, moving beyond simple accuracy measures to disentangle distinct cognitive and motivational processes. The paper reviews methodological approaches for assessing response inhibition, contrasting human-based tasks like the stop-signal task with animal-adapted paradigms such as the cylinder and detour barrier tasks. While the latter are widely used in comparative psychology, they suffer from an inability to estimate the latency of inhibition or separate "go" (impulsive) and "stop" (inhibitory) processes. To address this, the author discusses the development of a "continuous stop-change task," which allows for the direct measurement of movement trajectories and the independent assessment of go and stop latencies in species such as pheasants, pigeons, and gulls. The review also examines the theoretical underpinnings of the independent horse race model, which posits that response inhibition results from a race between independent go and stop processes, and discusses its refinements, including interactive race models that account for neural dynamics and capacity limitations. Key findings indicate that traditional detour tasks often misattribute behavioral differences solely to inhibitory control, ignoring the influence of the speed of the go runner. For instance, faster individuals may appear to have poorer inhibition simply because their go process is too rapid for the stop process to win the race. Studies using the continuous stop-change task reveal significant inter-individual, sex, and species variations; for example, lesser black-backed gulls stopped and changed actions faster than herring gulls, though they also initiated movements more quickly. The review further notes that response inhibition in animals is linked to fitness outcomes, such as reproductive success in magpies, and is influenced by environmental stressors like artificial light and traffic noise. The significance of this work lies in providing a rigorous conceptual and mathematical framework for interpreting response inhibition across species. By applying the horse race model, researchers can better distinguish between changes in impulsive tendencies and inhibitory capabilities, leading to more precise insights into the evolutionary and ecological drivers of cognitive flexibility. The paper concludes that while extending these models to continuous natural behaviors presents challenges regarding the definition of "finishing times," the framework remains essential for understanding how animals navigate complex environments and adapt to rapid anthropogenic changes.

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• executive function