Elsevier

Neuropsychologia

Volume 65, December 2014, Pages 263-278
Neuropsychologia

The inhibitory control reflex

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2014.08.014Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • Response inhibition is considered a hallmark of executive control.

  • Stopping can be primed by low-visibility primes or irrelevant stimuli.

  • It can also be triggered via the retrieval of associations from memory.

  • There may be an overlap with conditioned inhibition, as studied in animals.

Abstract

Response inhibition is typically considered a hallmark of deliberate executive control. In this article, we review work showing that response inhibition can also become a ‘prepared reflex’, readily triggered by information in the environment, or after sufficient training, or a ‘learned reflex’ triggered by the retrieval of previously acquired associations between stimuli and stopping. We present new results indicating that people can learn various associations, which influence performance in different ways. To account for previous findings and our new results, we present a novel architecture that integrates theories of associative learning, Pavlovian conditioning, and executive response inhibition. Finally, we discuss why this work is also relevant for the study of ‘intentional inhibition’.

Keywords

Response inhibition
Executive control
Learning
Priming

Cited by (0)

We thank Marcel Brass and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. A few subsections of this article, in particular the subsection on conditioned inhibition in animals, overlap with sections in McLaren & Verbruggen (‘Association and Inhibition’, a book chapter accepted for publication in ‘The Wiley Blackwell Handbook on the Cognitive Neuroscience of Learning’). This work was supported by an Economic and Social Research Council Grant (ES/J00815X/1) to FV and IPLM, studentships from the Economic and Social Research Council to MB and WB, and a starting grant to FV from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union׳s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ ERC Grant agreement no. 312445.