On the ability to inhibit simple and choice reaction time responses: A model and a method.

TLDR

The study reports four experiments investigating response inhibition in simple and choice reaction‑time tasks. Subjects performed letter‑response tasks with occasional stop‑signal tones, and the authors modeled inhibition as a race between the response and stopping processes, estimating stop‑signal reaction time and comparing delay‑selection methods. The race model successfully explained task differences in inhibition by transforming stop‑signal delays, and it performed well on both group and individual data regardless of delay selection.

Abstract

This article reports four experiments on the ability to inhibit responses in simple and choice reaction time (RT) tasks. Subjects responding to visually presented letters were occasionally presented with a stop signal (a tone) that told them not to respond on that trial. The major dependent variables were (a) the probability of inhibiting a response when the signal occurred, (b) mean and standard deviation (SD) of RT on no-signal trials, (c) mean RT on trials on which the signal occurred but subjects failed to inhibit, and (d) estimated RT to the stop signal. A model was proposed to estimated RT to the stop signal and to account for the relations among the variables. Its main assumption is that the RT process and the stopping process race, and response inhibition depends on which process finishes first. The model allows us to account for differences in response inhibition between tasks in terms of transformations of stop-signal delay that represent the relative finishing times of the RT process and the stopping process. The transformations specified by the model were successful in group data and in data from individual subjects, regardless of how delays were selected. The experiments also compared different methods of selecting stop-signal delays to equate the probability of inhibition in the two tasks.