Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Inhibitory control, the ability to stop inappropriate actions, isan important cognitive function often investigated via the stop-signal task, in which an infrequent stop signal instructs the sub-ject to stop a default go response. Previously, we proposed arational decision-making model for stopping, suggesting theobserver makes a repeated Go versus Wait choice at each in-stant, so that a Stop response is realized by repeatedly choosingto Wait. We propose an alternative model here that incorpo-rates a third choice, Stop. Critically, unlike the Wait action,choosing the Stop action not only blocks a Go response at thecurrent moment but also for the remainder of the trial – thedisadvantage of losing this flexibility is balanced by the bene-fit of not having to pay attention anymore. We show that thisnew model both reproduces known behavioral effects and hasinternal dynamics resembling presumed Go neural activationsin the brain.