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Should I stop or should I go? The role of associations and expectancies.

Maisy Best; Natalia S Lawrence; Gordon D Logan; Ian P L McLaren; Frederick Verbruggen

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J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2017 Feb;43(2):428. doi: 10.1037/xhp0000366

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Title: Should I stop or should I go? The role of associations and expectancies.
Author: Maisy Best; Natalia S Lawrence; Gordon D Logan; Ian P L McLaren; Frederick Verbruggen
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance · DOI 10.1037/xhp0000116 Published 2015-08-31 · Open source record
License: CC BY 3.0 deed

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Abstract Following exposure to consistent stimulus–stop mappings, response inhibition can become automatized with practice. What is learned is less clear, even though this has important theoretical and practical implications. A recent analysis indicates that stimuli can become associated with a stop signal or with a stop goal. Furthermore, expectancy may play an important role. Previous studies that have used stop or no-go signals to manipulate stimulus–stop learning cannot distinguish between stimulus-signal and stimulus-goal associations, and expectancy has not been measured properly. In the present study, participants performed a task that combined features of the go/no-go task and the stop-signal task in which the stop-signal rule changed at the beginning of each block. The go and stop signals were superimposed over 40 task-irrelevant images. Our results show that participants can learn direct associations between images and the stop goal without mediation via the stop signal. Exposure to the image-stop associations influenced task performance during training, and expectancies measured following task completion or measured within the task. But, despite this, we found an effect of stimulus–stop learning on test performance only when the task increased the task-relevance of the images. This could indicate that the influence of stimulus–stop learning on go performance is strongly influenced by attention to both task-relevant and task-irrelevant stimulus features. More generally, our findings suggest a strong interplay between automatic and controlled processes. Keywords: response inhibition, attention, automaticity, associative learning, expectancy

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Original journal: Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance
Published: 2015-08-31
DOI: 10.1037/xhp0000116
Open record: PMC4685931

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