Strategies,context, and the mechanism of response inhibition

A series of four experiments investigated Neill’s 11977) claim that there are inhibitory mechanisms in selective attention. It was demonstrated that the evidence supporting the inhibitory theory, namely, the diminished availability of distractor responses during a discretetrials version of the Stroop task is complicated by a number of strategic adaptations to various contingencies within the trial sequence. These results do not support a simple interpretation of response inhibition during the Stroop task.