Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cognitive inhibition is crucial for resolving conflict in decision making, but it is often estimated using reaction time differences between congruent and incongruent trials, which ignores accuracy and conflates inhibition with other processes. To address this, we adapted a Diffusion Model with Inhibition (DMI) to formally quantify cognitive inhibition—the suppression of task-irrelevant information—within a decision-making framework. This approach disentangles inhibition from processing speed and non-decision time. Combining computational modeling with structural equation modeling across multiple conflict tasks, we tested whether inhibition forms a coherent latent factor. Applying the same framework to large-scale data from over 1 million participants in the Implicit Association Task revealed distinct lifespan trajectories of inhibition across adulthood and aging. Overall, our findings show how computational modeling can uncover latent cognitive mechanisms underlying individual differences in inhibition.