School of Psychology, Jiangxi Normal University, Nanchang, China.
Mem Cognit. 2023 Aug;51(6):1388-1403. doi: 10.3758/s13421-023-01403-9. Epub 2023 Feb 28.
In daily life, we often need to inhibit a certain behavior or thought; however, sometimes we need to remove inhibition (deinhibition). Numerous studies have examined inhibition control, but it is unclear how deinhibition functions. In Experiment 1, we adopted a modified stop-signal task in which participants were instructed to immediately stop the prepared response to a stimulus appended by an accidental signal. The results showed that when the preceding trial was a stop-signal trial and participants successfully inhibited the action to the stimulus, the reaction time (RT) for the repeated stimuli in the current trial was significantly longer than that of the switched stimuli, reflecting the cost of deinhibition. Deinhibition ability is correlated with inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility. In Experiment 2, we manipulated stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between presentation of the stimuli and the stopping signals to exclude the interference of the signal preparation effect on the deinhibition cost. These findings suggest that an individual's deinhibition ability, as a previously ignored subcomponent of cognitive control, may play an important role in human adaptive behavior.
在日常生活中，我们常常需要抑制某种行为或想法；但有时，我们也需要去除抑制（去抑制）。已有大量研究探讨了抑制控制，但去抑制的作用机制仍不清楚。在实验 1 中，我们采用了改良的停止信号任务，要求参与者在刺激后出现意外信号时立即停止对刺激的预备反应。结果表明，当前一个试次为停止信号试次且参与者成功抑制了对刺激的反应时，当前试次中重复刺激的反应时（RT）明显长于转换刺激的 RT，这反映了去抑制的代价。去抑制能力与抑制控制和认知灵活性相关。在实验 2 中，我们操纵了刺激呈现与停止信号之间的刺激起始时间间隔（SOA），以排除信号准备效应对去抑制代价的干扰。这些发现表明，个体的去抑制能力作为认知控制中一个以前被忽视的子成分，可能在人类适应行为中发挥重要作用。
