As we emerge from the festive season, it seems appropriate to focus the current ‘Between the Covers’ article on the paper by Alessandro Macario and colleagues (Macario et al. 2021) which focuses on inhibitory control in guppies. They describe inhibitory control as the ability to overcome prepotent responses, in other words the ability to suppress or override impulsive responses in such a way that this results in more appropriate behaviour. Alternatively, putting this in a festive context; my ability to suppress my impulse to have another helping of Christmas pudding and to get up and start washing the dishes. This skill has been viewed as cognitively demanding (no doubt why I have failed in this respect at many a Christmas dinner) and has been found to vary widely across vertebrates as one might expect. To date, data are lacking for variation within many species. In their paper, Macario et al. (2021) showed that, in their population of guppies, females performed correctly in only ∼29% of trials of an inhibitory motor control task, which was twice lower than previously reported in other studies using the same species. The authors also demonstrated that inhibition varied at the individual level which may potentially explain individual differences in other cognitive functions such as spatial learning or reversal learning and ultimately contribute to the understanding of the evolution of fish cognition.

当我们从节日开始时，将当前的``封面之间''文章重点放在Alessandro Macario及其同事的论文上（Macario等2021），其重点是孔雀鱼的抑制性控制。他们将抑制性控制描述为克服有力反应的能力，换句话说，就是抑制或超越冲动反应的能力，从而导致更适当的行为。或者，将其置于节日气氛中；我抑制自己冲动的能力，可以再度过圣诞节布丁，起床并开始洗碗。这项技能被认为具有认知上的要求（毫无疑问，为什么我在许多圣诞节晚宴上在这方面都失败了），并且发现它在脊椎动物中的差异很大，正如人们所期望的那样。迄今为止，缺乏许多物种内变化的数据。在Macario等人的论文中。（2021）表明，在他们的孔雀鱼种群中，在抑制运动控制任务的试验中，雌性仅能完成约29％的试验，其性能比以前在使用相同物种的其他研究中的报道要低两倍。作者还证明了抑制作用在个体水平上是不同的，这可能潜在地解释了其他认知功能（例如空间学习或逆向学习）中的个体差异，并最终有助于对鱼类认知进化的理解。