Reliable Estimation of Inhibitory Efficiency: to Anticipate, Choose or Simply React?

Response inhibition is an important executive process studied by clinical and experimental psychologists, neurophysiologists and cognitive neuroscientists alike. Stop-signal paradigms are popular because they are grounded in a theory that provides methods to estimate the latency of an unobservable process: the stop-signal reaction time (SSRT). Critically, SSRT estimates can be biased by skew of the response time distribution and gradual slowing over the course of the experiment. Here, we present a series of experiments that directly compare three common stop-signal paradigms that differ in the distribution of response times. The results show that the widely used choice response (CR) and simple response (SR) time versions of the stop-signal paradigm are particularly susceptible to skew of the response time distribution and response slowing, and that using the anticipated response (AR) paradigm based on the Slater-Hammel task offers a viable alternative to obtain more reliable SSRT estimates.