ArticleFrontiers in psychology2017
Measures of Dogs' Inhibitory Control Abilities Do Not Correlate across Tasks.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 50 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
50 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- On the (limited) use of touchscreen-based behavioural and cognitive research with dogs: potential causes and future directions.Animal cognition · 2026Pooled it
- Concurrent Multidomain Cognitive Assessment and Serum BDNF Level in Aged Dogs: Comparison Between Normal Cognition and Mild Cognitive Impairment.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Article
- Exploring the relationship between inhibitory control and coping behaviour in horses.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Unpacking response Inhibition in animals - part 2: an empirical test.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Behavioural manifestations of human-directed social motivation in dogs.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Article
- Inhibitory control tests in non-human animals: validity, reliability, and perspectives.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Training Does Not Uniformly Increase Canine Self-Control.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Measuring self-control in a wild songbird using a spatial discounting task.Animal cognition · 2024Article
- A Comparison of Detour Behaviors in Some Marine and Freshwater Fish Species.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Towards an Objective Measurement Tool for ADHD-like Traits in Family Dogs: A Comprehensive Test Battery.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- A preliminary analysis of the effect of individual differences on cognitive performance in young companion dogs.Animal cognition · 2024Article
- Inhibitory control in teleost fish: a methodological and conceptual review.Animal cognition · 2024Review
- Impact of Training Discipline and Experience on Inhibitory Control and Cognitive Performance in Pet Dogs.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Repeatability and heritability of inhibitory control performance in wild toutouwai (Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Dogs take into account the actions of a human partner in a cooperative task.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Companion Cats Show No Effect of Trial-and-Error Learning Compared to Dogs in a Transparent-Obstacle Detour Task.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Individual differences in co-representation in three monkey species (Callithrix jacchus, Sapajus apella and Macaca tonkeana) in the joint Simon task: the role of social factors and inhibitory control.Animal cognition · 2022Article
- Variation in inhibitory control does not influence social rank, foraging efficiency, or risk taking, in red junglefowl females.Animal cognition · 2022Article
- Personality and social environment predict cognitive performance in common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus).Scientific reports · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Inhibitory control, the ability to overcome prepotent but ineffective behaviors, has been studied extensively across species, revealing the involvement of this ability in many different aspects of life. While various different paradigms have been created in order to measure inhibitory control, only a limited number of studies have investigated whether such measurements indeed evaluate the same underlying mechanism, especially in non-human animals. In humans, inhibitory control is a complex construct composed of distinct behavioral processes rather than of a single unified measure. In the current study, we aimed to investigate the validity of inhibitory control paradigms in dogs. Sixty-seven dogs were tested in a battery consisting of frequently used inhibitory control tests. Additionally, dog owners were asked to complete an impulsivity questionnaire about their dog. No correlation of dogs' performance across tasks was found. In order to understand whether there are some underlying behavioral aspects explaining dogs' performance across tests, we performed principle component analyses. Results revealed that three components (persistency, compulsivity and decision speed) explained the variation across tasks. The questionnaire and dogs' individual characteristics (i.e., age and sex) provided only limited information for the derived components. Overall, results suggest that no unique measurement for inhibitory control exists in dogs, but tests rather measure different aspects of this ability. Considering the context-specificity of inhibitory control in dogs and most probably also in other non-human animals, extreme caution is needed when making conclusions about inhibitory control abilities based on a single test.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.