The Relationships Between Inhibitory Processes and Selective Attention: Studies and Paradigms

Introduction

We all know that if we want to do a task of some complexity in the right way, we must concentrate, pay attention or focus on what we are doing. However, this is not so simple due to the amount and diversity of distracting stimuli to which we are exposed daily and which often manage to capture our attention despite our efforts to avoid it. For example, suppose we have to solve a mathematical problem that involves several steps and is unfamiliar to us. Potential sources of distraction can be enormous; the comments of two people talking nearby, the ads that appear on the website I am working on, a huge and luminous new poster that I see through the window of my desk, the memory of the discussion I had yesterday with my boss, the chores left to do at home, the desire to go out for coffee, to take the cell phone to see the last messages from my group of friends, the pending conversation with my husband, etc. The list of potentially distracting events and situations can be endless. Clearly, in order to solve the problem with the minimum amount of possible errors and in a reasonable time, we must be able to attend and concentrate on what we are doing. It is clear that if we do not manage to concentrate, we will not be able to carry out the task properly, we will make a number of mistakes and will even take much longer than planned to complete it (Buschaman et al., 2015; Hasher et al., 2007; Moorelaar & Slagter, 2020).

Thanks to the selective attention ability, we human beings managed to perform several of the most important activities of our daily life. Selective attention is a complex cognitive function that guides and directs our attention towards objects or stimuli (i.e. internal or external) that interest us or are relevant to an ongoing task or activity (Schmeichel & Baumeister, 2010; Buschaman et al., 2015; Parasuraman, 1998) and even makes it possible to focus attention on one source or type of information excluding others (e.g. one of several information channels or sensory attributes; Van Zomeren & Brouwer, 1994). However, as expressed in the above definition, selective attention is a complex function, which means from cognitive psychology that different cognitive processes participate in it or intervene. Much, if not most, of these cognitive processes are known in the literature as processes of cognitive or Executive Control (EC). EC processes are those that allow us to replace a dominant response or behavior with a weaker or less dominant one (Hsu et al., 2014; Schmeichel & Baumeister, 2010; Posner & Fan, 2007). Even this controlled aspect of attention constitutes the hierarchically superior level of attentional varieties and requires the orchestration of different processes and skills to cope with new tasks, not routine, technically difficult requiring a strategy.

Let us return to our previous example. How can we avoid the noise of traffic, the luminous sign, the memory of the pending tasks and the desire to go out for a coffee that do not capture our attention? More precisely, how to avoid the interference generated by these distracting stimuli? The clue word for that is Inhibition.

These questions lead us to the main objective of the chapter; that is, to analyze current theoretical proposals about inhibition. Therefore, we will focus the discussion on several aspects related to inhibitory functioning. For it, in the following sections we will address some main topics: a) the relationship between inhibition and interference, b) the relationship between selective attention and self-regulation, c) their operational and multidimensional aspects, d) the role of inhibition in complex cognitive functioning, and e) the main experimental paradigms that were used.