Are stopping an action and ignoring distraction the same skill?
In 11- and 12-year-olds, the ability to stop an action and the ability to ignore distracting information turned out to be separate skills that are linked only because both lean on working memory.
Source
A Hierarchical Model of Inhibitory Control
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Individual-differences study: one testing session of working memory and inhibition tasks, analysed with confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling
- N
- N=136 · 136 typically developing children aged 11-12 years; some had missing data on individual tasks
- Population
- Typically developing 11- to 12-year-old children recruited from schools in metropolitan Melbourne, Australia
- Outcome
- Latent factors for working memory capacity (Listening Recall, Counting Recall, Backward Digit Recall), response inhibition (stop-signal SSRT, go/no-go commission errors, Simon conflict) and attentional inhibition (Stroop, Flanker and shape-matching stimulus-stimulus conflict)
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What they did
The researchers gave 136 children aged 11 to 12 a battery of computer tasks in a single session: working memory span tasks, response-inhibition tasks (stop-signal, go/no-go and Simon) and attentional-inhibition tasks (modified Stroop, modified Flanker and a shape-matching task with distractors). The Stroop and Flanker tasks were redesigned so that conflict between stimuli could be separated from conflict between responses. They then used structural equation modelling to test whether both kinds of inhibition depend on working memory capacity but are otherwise independent.
What they found
Working memory capacity significantly predicted both inhibition factors, explaining about 41% of the variance in response inhibition but only about 11% in attentional inhibition. Once working memory was accounted for, the two inhibition factors were no longer correlated, so the final model treated them as separate abilities. The task analysis also showed that most of the Flanker interference effect (86%) came from response conflict, whereas most of the Stroop interference (84%) came from stimulus conflict, which means the Flanker task is a poor measure of attentional inhibition.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The inhibition factors had below-adequate construct reliability, and the attentional-inhibition factor was weakly identified partly because the Flanker measure loaded poorly, so the apparent independence may partly reflect noisy measurement. The study is correlational and cross-sectional, so it cannot establish that working memory causes better inhibition; tests of which way the dependence runs were inconclusive. Only a narrow age band was tested, so the structure may look different in younger children or adults, and the authors call for larger samples and more indicators.
Key terms
- Response inhibition
- Stopping or withholding a strong, prepared motor response, as measured by stop-signal and go/no-go tasks.
- Attentional inhibition
- Resisting interference from irrelevant stimuli in the environment so that attention stays on the target.
- Working memory capacity (WMC)
- How much goal-relevant information a person can actively hold and manipulate while doing something else, measured with complex span tasks.
- Stop-signal reaction time (SSRT)
- An estimate of how long it takes to cancel a response after a stop signal; shorter times mean more efficient inhibition.
- Stimulus-stimulus vs stimulus-response conflict
- Interference caused by clashing features of the stimuli themselves versus interference caused by a distractor that activates the wrong response.
- Task impurity problem
- Any single task score reflects several cognitive processes at once, so constructs are best measured with multiple tasks combined into a latent factor.
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Quiz yourself
What did the final model conclude about response and attentional inhibition?
Common questions
Why does it matter whether the Flanker task measures response or stimulus conflict?
Many studies use the Flanker task as a measure of ignoring distractors. If most of its interference comes from competing responses, it is really tapping response selection, so conclusions about attentional inhibition drawn from it may be wrong.
What does 'hierarchical' mean in this model?
Working memory capacity sits above the two inhibition abilities as a shared resource that supports both, while each inhibition ability also has its own unique variance.
Does this mean working memory training would fix impulsivity?
The authors argue it probably would not fully, because working memory explained under half of the variation in response inhibition; they suggest combining working memory and inhibition training.
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