Modelling correlations in 'response inhibition'

"Response inhibition" is argued by many authors to be a general cognitive control process or function that is invoked in situations where it is necessary to avoid producing an habitual or prepotent response. Individual differences in the efficacy of this function are consequently held to underlie individual differences in performance on tasks that are thought to rely on the function. This position is supported by empirical studies which have reported mild but reliable correlations across subjects in performance on response inhibition tasks such as Stroop colour-naming and the stop-signal task. This paper investigates the computational basis of response inhibition by exploring potential common mechanisms within existing computational models of the Stroop and stop-signal tasks. It is argued that mechanisms such as lateral inhibition, which are shared by the models and which might be thought to relate to the response inhibition construct, cannot account for the observed behavioural correlations. Instead, it is suggested that such correlations are likely to arise from a computational process of attentional bias