The practice of going helps children to stop: the importance of context monitoring in inhibitory control

Abstract

How do we stop ourselves during ongoing action? Recent work implies that stopping per se is easy given sufficient monitoring of contextual cues signaling the need to change action. We test key implications of this idea for improving inhibitory control. Seven- to 9-year-old children practiced stopping an ongoing action or monitoring for cues that signaled the need to go again. Both groups subsequently showed better response inhibition in a Stop-Signal task than active controls, and practice monitoring yielded a dose-response relationship. When monitoring practice was optimized to occur while children engaged in responding, the greatest benefits were observed-even greater than from practicing stopping itself. These findings demonstrate the importance of monitoring processes in developing response inhibition and suggest promising new directions for interventions.