AI Insight
This study identifies two distinct types of failures in response inhibition, the ability to stop unwanted movements. Using computational modeling and neural measurements in 253 participants, researchers found that some failures occur not because the stopping process is too slow, but because it fails to initiate altogether. These "trigger failures" showed distinct characteristics from other inhibitory failures, including absence of a specific brain signal associated with stopping attempts, and were not caused by attention lapses or premature responses.
Why it matters
Understanding these two failure mechanisms could improve interventions for conditions involving impulse control deficits, such as ADHD, addiction, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The findings suggest that treatments may need to target different underlying mechanisms depending on whether patients struggle with slow inhibition or failure to initiate stopping.
Understand the Science
⚠️ Preprint – Noch nicht peer-reviewed
Dieser Artikel wurde noch nicht von unabhängigen Experten begutachtet. Die Ergebnisse sind vorläufig und sollten mit Vorsicht interpretiert werden.
Response inhibition is a key control function that allows humans to perform safe, goal-directed behaviors. The dominant behavioral-computational model holds that response inhibition fails when the inhibition process is too slow to intercept unwanted movements. However, many have hypothesized that some inhibitory failures instead result from a failure to launch the inhibition process altogether. Since no method exists to identify individual ‘trigger failure’ (TF) trials, they are hitherto a largely hypothetical phenomenon. We combined Bayesian process-mixture modeling with likelihood ratio testing and jackknife resampling to identify TF trials in 253 humans. We find that TF indeed represent a separate category from other inhibitory failures. Unlike other inhibitory failures, TF do not result from premature responses. Furthermore, TF lack a stop-signal P3 event-related potential, a neural index of response inhibition. Surprisingly, TF do not result from perceptual/attentional lapses. Thus, TF are a qualitatively distinct class of executive failure during response inhibition.