Automatic and controlled response inhibition: associative learning in the go/no-go and stop-signal paradigms

In 5 experiments, the authors examined the development of automatic response inhibition in the go/no-go paradigm and a modified version of the stop-signal paradigm. They hypothesized that automatic response inhibition may develop over practice when stimuli are consistently associated with stopping. All 5 experiments consisted of a training phase and a test phase in which the stimulus mapping was reversed for a subset of the stimuli. Consistent with the automatic-inhibition hypothesis, the authors found that responding in the test phase was slowed when the stimulus had been consistently associated with stopping in the training phase. In addition, they found that response inhibition benefited from consistent stimulus-stop associations. These findings suggest that response inhibition may rely on the retrieval of stimulus-stop associations after practice with consistent stimulus-stop mappings. Stimulus-stop mapping is typically consistent in the go/no-go paradigm, so automatic inhibition is likely to occur. However, stimulus-stop mapping is typically inconsistent in the stop-signal paradigm, so automatic inhibition is unlikely to occur. Thus, the results suggest that the two paradigms are not equivalent because they allow different kinds of response inhibition.