How Does the Presence of Others Influence Control Inhibition? Contradictory Evidence Using an Antisaccade and Stop Signal Task

Abstract

Inhibitory control (IC) is defined as the (in)ability to change, suppress, or delay a response that is no longer required under the current circumstances. This ability was previously argued to increase in social contexts, based on Stroop’s performance, showing that participants performed the Stroop task better in others’ presence than alone. In this paper, we extend the testing of this same hypothesis to the use of two other tasks that Mitake et al. (2000) show to grasp the same IC ability; the Antisaccade and Stop signal tasks. If Stroop’s performance was capturing the impact of the presence of others on CI abilities, the effect would generalize to performance on these tasks. This hypothesis was only generally supported by stop signal task performance; those in the presence condition were significantly more efficient than those in the alone conditions. For the Antisaccade tasks, evidence shows that higher levels of interference occurs in the presence of others condition for participants' fastest responses We discuss how this evidence contributes to the literature suggesting that the two tasks may index different constructs.