Refining the understanding of inhibitory processes: how response prepotency is created and overcome

Abstract

Understanding (a) how responses become prepotent provides insights into when inhibition is needed in everyday life. Understanding (b) how response prepotency is overcome provides insights for helping children develop strategies for overcoming such tendencies. Concerning (a), on tasks such as the day-night Stroop-like task, is the difficulty with inhibiting saying the name of the stimulus due to the name being semantically related to the correct response or to its being a valid response on the task (i.e. a member of the response set) though incorrect for this stimulus? Experiment 1 (with 40 4-year-olds) suggests that prepotency is caused by membership in the response set and not semantic relation. Concerning (b), Diamond, Kirkham and Amso (2002) found that 4-year-olds could succeed on the day-night task if the experimenter sang a ditty after showing the stimulus card, before the child was to respond. They concluded that it was because delaying children’s responses gave them time to compute the correct answer. However, Experiment 2 (with 90 3-year-olds) suggests that such a delay helps because it gives the incorrect, prepotent response time to passively dissipate, not because of active computation during the delay.

Supporting executive functions during children's preliteracy learning with the computer

“…Taking a short delay generally leads to fading of the load of the impulsive response, which then becomes replaced by a more self-regulated response. This Passive Dissipation Model (Simpson et al, 2012) has been shown by many studies. Diamond, Kirkham, and Amso (2002), for example, compared six conditions to reduce inhibitory and/or memory load in an EF-task and showed that young children's performance increased most when they were provided with short delays between stimulus and response.…”

“…Two interlinked activities that have shown effective are inserting short delays and verbal self-monitoring (Fradley, 2005;Bodrova & Leong, 2007;Fernyhough & Fuhs & Day, 2011;Simpson et al, 2012). Through verbal self-monitoring, children are elicited longer response latencies to reduce the load on their first prepotent impulse and to formulate more self-regulated responses (Simpson et al, 2012;Diamond, 2013). Moreover, repeated practice with such EFactivities may lead to internalization over time with stronger benefits on the long-term as well (Holmes et al, 2009;Fuhs & Day, 2011;).…”

“…Embedded EFsupporting activities can help with regulating children's learning behaviour. Two interlinked activities that have shown effective are inserting short delays and verbal self-monitoring (Fradley, 2005;Bodrova & Leong, 2007;Fernyhough & Fuhs & Day, 2011;Simpson et al, 2012). Through verbal self-monitoring, children are elicited longer response latencies to reduce the load on their first prepotent impulse and to formulate more self-regulated responses (Simpson et al, 2012;Diamond, 2013).…”

Executive Function in Preschoolers with Primary Language Impairment

“…The stimuli were linguistic and had a semantic relation between the to-be-inhibited and correct responses (i.e., "dog" and "cat" are semantically related). Both of the semantic representations were activated and held in an activated state during the task (Simpson et al, 2012). This task required children to inhibit the semantically-related representation in order to correctly respond to the target, which may have been difficult for the PLI group because of their weakness in processing and inhibiting semantically-related information (Cummings & Ceponiene, 2010).…”

Explicit and Implicit Verbal Response Inhibition in Preschool-Age Children Who Stutter

“…This suggests that the primary demand in these tasks is response inhibition (Montgomery & Koeltzow, 2010;Simpson & Riggs, 2005). Second, when a delay is interposed between the presentation of the stimulus and when the child can respond on these tasks, children's performance markedly improves (e.g., Diamond, Kirkham, & Amso, 2002;Jones, Rothbart, & Posner, 2003;Ling, Wong, & Diamond, 2016;Montgomery & Fosco, 2012;Simpson et al, 2012). As noted by Ling et al (2016), preschool children are often so eager to respond that they tend to respond with the first thing that comes to mind, making inhibition particularly challenging.…”