Measurement and Reliability of Response Inhibition

Response inhibition plays a critical role in adaptive functioning and can be assessed with the Stop-signal task, which requires participants to suppress prepotent motor responses. Evidence suggests that this ability to inhibit a motor response that has already been initiated (reflected as Stop-signal reaction time (SSRT)) is a quantitative and heritable measure of interindividual variation in brain function. In order to examine the reliability of this measure, we pooled data across three separate studies and examined the influence of multiple SSRT calculation methods and outlier calling on reliability (using Intra-class correlation). Our results suggest that an approach which uses the average of all available sessions, all trials of each session, and excludes outliers based on predetermined lenient criteria yields reliable SSRT estimates, while not excluding too many participants. Our findings support the reliability of SSRT as an index of inhibitory control, and provide support for its continued use as a neurocognitive phenotype