Automaticity of cognitive control: Goal priming in response-inhibition paradigms.

Response inhibition is a hallmark of cognitive control. An executive system inhibits responses by activating a stop goal when a stop signal is presented. The authors asked whether the stop goal could be primed by task-irrelevant information in stop-signal and go/no-go paradigms. In Experiment 1, the task-irrelevant primes GO, ###, or STOP were presented in the go stimulus. Go performance was slower for STOP than for ### or GO. This suggests that the stop goal was primed by task-irrelevant information. In Experiment 2, STOP primed the stop goal only in conditions in which the goal was relevant to the task context. In Experiment 3, GO, ###, or STOP were presented as stop signals. Stop performance was slower for GO than for ### or STOP. These findings suggest that task goals can be primed and that response inhibition and executive control can be influenced by automatic processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)