The detour paradigm in animal cognition

Abstract

In this paper, we review one of the oldest paradigms used in animal cognition: the detour paradigm. The paradigm presents the subject with a situation where a direct route to the goal is blocked and a detour must be made to reach it. Often being an ecologically valid and a versatile tool, the detour paradigm has been used to study diverse cognitive skills like insight, social learning, inhibitory control and route planning. Due to the relative ease of administrating detour tasks, the paradigm has lately been used in large-scale comparative studies in order to investigate the evolution of inhibitory control. Here we review the detour paradigm and some of its cognitive requirements, we identify various ecological and contextual factors that might affect detour performance, we also discuss developmental and neurological underpinnings of detour behaviors, and we suggest some methodological approaches to make species comparisons more robust.

Keywords: Comparative psychology; Detour behavior; Inhibitory control; Route planning.

Fig. 1

A display of eight of the most common setups in detour tasks; each setup comes with two symbols: a half-filled circle (a goal), and a filled triangle (a subject), and occupies a separate panel. Within each panel, the upper figure shows the bird-eye view, while the lower figure the first-person view. The setups belong to the following tasks: a the cylinder task requires a reaching detour through one of the side openings of the transparent cylinder. b Inward detour task requires locomotion detour around a V-shaped transparent/fence barrier. c Plexiglas-hole task requires a reaching detour through one of the two holes in a Plexiglas panel placed upright between the subject and the reward. d Swing-door task requires a reaching detour through the door that is furthest from the goal. The doors can only be opened by pushing them forward, and an attempt to open the door that is closer to the goal results in the goal falling backwards and becoming out of reach. e Detour reaching task (object-retrieval task) requires a reaching detour through the side opening of the transparent box. The box has only one opening, which allows changing the open side facing the subject across trials. f Delayed-detour task requires passing by an opaque corridor and in the end selecting between two paths, only one of which leads to the goal room. g Four-compartment box task requires the subject to turn its back to the goal and choose among four doors, only two of which lead to the goal room. h Detour-choice task requires the subject to turn its back to the goal that is placed on top of a tower, and select among two poles, only one of which leads to the tower where the goal is placed