Should we stop thinking about inhibition? Searching for individual and age differences in inhibition ability.

Abstract

Inhibition is often conceptualized as a unitary construct reflecting the ability to ignore and suppress irrelevant information. At the same time, it has been subdivided into inhibition of prepotent responses (i.e., the ability to stop dominant responses) and resistance to distracter interference (i.e., the ability to ignore distracting information). The present study investigated the unity and diversity of inhibition as a psychometric construct, and tested the hypothesis of an inhibition deficit in older age. We measured inhibition in young and old adults with 11 established laboratory tasks: antisaccade, stop-signal, color Stroop, number Stroop, arrow flanker, letter flanker, Simon, global-local, positive and negative compatibility tasks, and n-2 repetition costs in task switching. In both age groups, the inhibition measures from individual tasks had good reliabilities, but correlated only weakly among each other. Structural equation modeling identified a 2-factor model with factors for inhibition of prepotent responses and resistance to distracter interference. Older adults scored worse in the inhibition of prepotent response, but better in the resistance to distracter interference. However, the model had low explanatory power. Together, these findings call into question inhibition as a psychometric construct and the hypothesis of an inhibition deficit in older age. (PsycINFO Database Record

Processing speed, working memory, and executive functions: Independent or inter-related predictors of general intelligence

“…Moreover, manipulation-specific factors did not show any consistent correlational pattern with each other, indicating that executive functions required by the different experimental manipulations are divergent rather than unitary. While this may arguably be specific to the task used within this study, our results are in line with recent results suggesting that individual differences in executive functions, specifically inhibition, may not be as unitary as suggested (Rey-Mermet et al, 2018;Stahl et al, 2014). In detail, Rey-Mermet et al (2018) did not find any correlations among difference scores in a set of eight different inhibition tasks.…”

“…While this may arguably be specific to the task used within this study, our results are in line with recent results suggesting that individual differences in executive functions, specifically inhibition, may not be as unitary as suggested (Rey-Mermet et al, 2018;Stahl et al, 2014). In detail, Rey-Mermet et al (2018) did not find any correlations among difference scores in a set of eight different inhibition tasks. In sum, correlations between difference measures from a set of heterogeneous executive functioning tasks both with each other and with external criteria seem to be small and largely inconsistent (Hedge et al, 2018;Rey-Mermet, Gade, Souza, von Bastian, & Oberauer, 2019;Stahl et al, 5 Please note that we still use the term executive functions in the sense of attention regulation mechanisms described by Miyake et al (2000).…”

“…So assuming that general factors captured EF would suggest that ECTs require executive functions to some extent despite not explicitly introducing manipulations related to EF. Altogether, the solution to an adequate measurement of individual difference in EFs still seems to be elusive (Hedge et al, 2018;Rey-Mermet, Gade, & Oberauer, 2018;. Ultimately, establishing theoretically grounded measures for executive functions is a critical step towards accurately assessing the relationship between EFs and individual differences in other cognitive processes such as intelligence, WMC, and PS.…”

A chronometric model of the relationship between frontal midline theta functional connectivity and human intelligence

“…As there is currently no consensus regarding the best measures of cognitive control (Draheim, Tsukahara, et al, 2019;Hedge et al, 2018;Paap & Sawi, 2016;Rey-Mermet et al, 2018;Rouder & Haaf, 2019;Schubert & Rey-Mermet, 2019), it would be important to demonstrate that the association between functional connectivity and fluid intelligence found in the present study can be generalized to other measures of cognitive control. One of the most established measures of cognitive control is the antisaccade task, in which participants have to inhibit a prepotent saccade response towards a lateralized cue and make a voluntary saccade to the opposite side to identify a briefly presented target stimulus (Draheim, Tsukahara, et al, 2019;Kane, Bleckley, Conway, & Engle, 2001;Rey-Mermet et al, 2018). Because cue-evoked saccades evoke strong electrophysiological activity (i.e., ocular artifacts) that cannot be easily distinguished from genuine neural activity when locked to cue onset, however, the antisaccade task is ill-suited for electrophysiological studies.…”

“…Difference score measures, on the other hand, are supposed to reflect individual differences in cognitive control more validly because they isolate the cognitive control process of interest by directly measuring interindividual differences in intraindividual experimental effects (but see Rey-Mermet et al, 2019;and Schubert, Hagemann, Voss, Schankin, & Bergmann, 2015 for criticisms of the underlying assumption of additive factors that experimental manipulations selectively affect a single process of interest). However, experimentally validated difference score measures of cognitive control are often task-specific, show low reliabilities, and show little variation between individuals (Gärtner & Strobel, 2019;Hedge et al, 2018;Rey-Mermet et al, 2018;Rouder & Haaf, 2019). For these reasons, correlations between difference score measures of cognitive control and fluid intelligence are typically lower than those of mean performance measures and often fail to reach statistical significance at all (e.g., Friedman et al, 2006;Frischkorn et al, 2019;Rey-Mermet et al, 2019).…”