Executive function
Are stopping an action and ignoring distraction the same skill?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
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.
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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Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
How this study connects
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