Response inhibition is typically considered a hallmark of deliberate executive control. In this article, we review work showing that response inhibition can also become a 'prepared reflex', readily triggered by information in the environment, or after sufficient training, or a 'learned reflex' triggered by the retrieval of previously acquired associations between stimuli and stopping. We presen...

Although hindsight bias (the "I knew it all along" phenomenon) has been documented in adults, its development has not been investigated. This is despite the fact that hindsight bias errors closely resemble the errors children make on theory of mind (ToM) tasks. Two main goals of the present work were to (a) create a battery of hindsight tasks for preschoolers, and (b) assess the relation betwee...

Inhibitory control processes have been recently considered to be involved in interference resolution in bilinguals at the phonological level. In this study we explored if interference resolution is also carried out by this inhibitory mechanism at the grammatical level. Thirty-two bilinguals (Italian-L1 and Spanish-L2) participated. All of them completed two tasks. In the first one they had to n...

Response inhibition is often considered to be a deliberate act of cognitive control. However, our and other research suggests that when stimuli are repeatedly paired with an inhibitory response, inhibition can become automatized. Currently, relatively little research has focused on the nature of the associative structure that underpins stimulus-specific inhibitory training. In this study, we in...

BACKGROUND Inhibitory control, or the ability to suppress planned but inappropriate prepotent actions in the current environment, plays an important role in the control of human performance. Evidence from empirical studies utilizing a sport-specific design has shown that athletes have superior inhibitory control. However, less is known about whether this superiority might (1) still be seen in a...

Many recent studies have explored young children’s ability to use information from physical representations of space to guide search within the real world. In one commonly used procedure, children are asked to find a hidden toy in a room after observing a smaller toy being hidden in the analogous location in a scale model of the room. Three-year-old children readily find the hidden toy, althoug...

We report an experiment testing the hypothesis that impuistve behavior reflects a deficit in the ability to inhibit prepotent responses. Specifically, we examined whether impulsive people respond more slowly to signals to inhibit ("stop signals) than nonimpulsive people. In this experiment, 136 undergraduate students completed an impulsiviry questionnaire and then participated in a stop-signal ...