Reliable estimation of inhibitory efficiency: to anticipate, choose or simply react?

Response inhibition is an important executive process studied by clinical and experimental psychologists, neurophysiologists and cognitive neuroscientists alike. Stop‐signal paradigms are popular because they are grounded in a theory that provides methods to estimate the latency of an unobservable process: the stop‐signal reaction time ( SSRT ). Critically, SSRT estimates can be biased by skew of the response time distribution and gradual slowing over the course of the experiment. Here, we present a series of experiments that directly compare three common stop‐signal paradigms that differ in the distribution of response times. The results show that the widely used choice response ( CR ) and simple response ( SR ) time versions of the stop‐signal paradigm are particularly susceptible to skew of the response time distribution and response slowing, and that using the anticipated response ( AR ) paradigm based on the Slater‐Hammel task offers a viable alternative to obtain more reliable SSRT estimates.