Doekemeijer Roos A, Dewulf Anneleen, Verbruggen Frederick, Boehler C Nico
Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
J Cogn. 2023 May 4;6(1):22. doi: 10.5334/joc.264. eCollection 2023.
People are able to stop actions before they are executed, and proactively slow down the speed of going in line with their expectations of needing to stop. Such slowing generally increases the probability that stopping will be successful. Surprisingly though, no study has clearly demonstrated that the speed of stopping (measured as the stop-signal reaction time, SSRT) is reduced by such proactive adjustments. In addition to a number of studies showing non-significant effects, the only study that initially had observed a clear effect in this direction found that it was artifactually driven by a confounding variable (specifically, by context-independence violations, which jeopardize the validity of the SSRT estimation). Here, we tested in two well-powered and well-controlled experiments whether the SSRT is shorter when stopping is anticipated. In each experiment, we used a Stop-Signal Task, in which the stop-trial frequency was either high (50%) or low (20%). Our results robustly show that the SSRT was shorter when stop signals were more anticipated (i.e., in the high-frequent condition) while carefully controlling for context-independence violations. Hence, our study is first to demonstrate a clear proactive benefit on the speed of stopping, in line with an ability to emphasize going or stopping, by trading off the speed of both.
人们能够在行动执行前停止行动，并根据他们对需要停止的预期主动放慢行动速度。这种放慢通常会增加停止成功的概率。然而，令人惊讶的是，没有研究明确证明这种主动调整会降低停止速度（以停止信号反应时间，即SSRT衡量）。除了一些显示无显著影响的研究外，唯一一项最初在这个方向观察到明显影响的研究发现，这是由一个混杂变量人为驱动的（具体来说，是由违反情境独立性驱动的，这会危及SSRT估计的有效性）。在这里，我们在两个功效强大且控制良好的实验中测试了预期停止时SSRT是否更短。在每个实验中，我们使用了停止信号任务，其中停止试验的频率要么高（50%）要么低（20%）。我们的结果有力地表明，在仔细控制情境独立性违反的情况下，当更预期停止信号时（即高频率条件下），SSRT更短。因此，我们的研究首次证明了对停止速度有明显的主动益处，这与通过权衡两者的速度来强调行动或停止的能力一致。
