Evidence for response inhibition as a control process distinct from the common executive function: A two-study factor analysis.

The dominant model of executive functions, which has held for over two decades, contends that various aspects of seemingly disparate forms of inhibitory control-for example, inhibiting a prepotent response, or inhibiting irrelevant thoughts and distractions-are in fact manifestations of a single latent executive function. Recent work, however, has cast doubt on this dominant model, as certain conditions can dissociate performance on tasks thought to index inhibitory control. Moreover, issues related to task reliability and latent estimation of inhibition processes have prompted questions about whether the structure of inhibitory control can even be reliably estimated at a latent level. We addressed these issues in two studies of healthy young adults (Study 1