The Inhibition of Unwanted Actions

Inhibitory control is one of many high-level cognitive processes that fall under the rubric of “executive” or “cognitive” control. Successfully withholding an over-learned, prepotent, or planned motor response is a critical demonstration of inhibitory control. Here, we briefly review key studies of inhibitory control with a special emphasis on cognitive neuroscience studies. We aim to provide some insights into the potential neural mechanisms that may underlie our ability to inhibit unwanted action. Leveraged with these findings, we argue that inhibitory control, like voluntary control more generally, is best modeled as the process by which we select the best response among the competing responses, including not responding at all. One implication of this model is that no single area of the brain is specialized for inhibiting all unwanted actions.