Perceptual, Cognitive and Response Inhibition in Emotional Contexts in Children

Inhibitory control is 1 of the main executive functions responsible for stopping or attenuating interference generated by prepotent tendencies linked with emotion, thought, or behavior that could interfere with goal achievement. Current approaches state the need for fragmenting the inhibitory function into a set of processes: perceptual, cognitive, and response inhibition, although there is some debate regarding the structure of this process. Likewise, inhibitory functioning has been studied mostly in neutral (also called cool) contexts, and exhaustive studies of this process are scarce. Therefore, this work deals with the study of inhibitory control in both neutral and emotional contexts. In this study, each inhibitory process was assessed by a specific task on a sample of 435 children. The obtained results support the 3-factor structure of the inhibitory processes, in line with multidimensional inhibition models.