Cognitive Inhibition as a Core Component of Executive Functions:Exploring Intra- and Interindividual Differences

Cognitive inhibition is an essential executive function that we use in our everyday lives. Numerous factors have been claimed to influence this construct including video gaming, exercise and expertise in musical instruments. However, in this thesis, I focus on an understudied factor, the alignment of chronotype and testing time, and a heavily studied yet controversial factor, bilingualism. Throughout this thesis, with one exception, I present a series of experiments which have been conducted online. In the first empirical chapter, I examined a relatively novel Faces task which the authors have claimed to measure three cognitive processes, including two different forms of inhibition and task switching (Chapter 2). Based on this chapter's findings, I decided to use the Faces task in Chapters 3, 4 and 6. The next two chapters determined whether the alignment of time of testing and chronotype influences inhibition and task switching among the young adult (Chapter 3) and older adult (Chapter 4) population. Afterwards, I explored how conflict is resolved through a mouse tracking paradigm and by extension, whether this paradigm can be used for a variety of inhibition tasks (Chapter 5). For the final empirical chapter, I identified whether training inhibition in a verbal domain impacts inhibition in a non-verbal domain (i.e., far transfer effects). To achieve this, I investigated whether bilingualism, which can be seen as a form of cognitive training within the verbal domain, influences performance in non-verbal tasks which index inhibition (Chapter 6). The main findings of this thesis suggest that cognitive inhibition is not substantially impacted by synchrony effects nor by bilingualism. Furthermore, the findings imply that mouse tracking could be a promising tool to use to examine cognitive inhibition