The 3 studies reported here were designed to clarify the nature of the personality trait of impulsivity. Two types of impulsivity were distinguished. Dysfunctional impulsivity is the tendency to act with less forethought than most people of equal ability when this tendency is a source of difficulty; most previous work on impulsivity appears to have focused on this trait. Functional impulsivity, in contrast, is the tendency to act with relatively little forethought when such a style is optimal. The present work indicates that these two tendencies are not highly correlated and that they bear different relations both to other personality traits and to the manner in which certain basic cognitive processes are executed. A substantial body of evidence suggests that individual differences in the personality trait of extraversion are associated with individual differences in the way basic cognitive processes are carried out. These basic cognitive processes include the retrieval of information from short-and long-term memory (

Despite its theoretical importance for such areas of research as reflection-impulsivity (Kagan, 1966), there is little evidence to support the assumption that individual differences in the personality trait of impulsivity are associated with differences in the willingness to sacrifice accuracy for speed of information processing. The present studies explored this association further. In Experiment 1, high, medium, and low impulsives (identified by self-report) performed a visual-comparison task under conditions differing in the monetary payoff for speed relative to accuracy. High impulsives were consistently faster and less accurate than other subjects. However, an analysis based on Sternberg's (1969) additive-factor method indicated that high impulsives performed at least one stage of information processing as slowly and accurately as other subjects. In Experiment 2, it was found that high impulsives were actually more accurate than low impulsives when all subjects were required to process information extremely rapidly. Experiment 3 identified the response execution stage as one that high impulsives carry out just as slowly and accurately as other individuals. The data from these experiments pose problems for a simple speed-accuracy tradeoff model of impulsive cognitive functioning.

Impulsivity is the tendency to act with less forethought than do most individuals of equal ability and knowledge. There exists a body of research on the way impulsive individuals carry out such basic cognitive processes as stimulus encoding, visual search, retrieval from short-and long-term memory, problem solving, and motor control. This chapter will review that body of research, assess the degree to which its findings lend support to each of the major theories of impulsivity, and outline an alternate theory of impulsivity that appears to account better for this body of data than do previous theories.Impulsivity has primarily been measured by means of self-report inventories. These inventories include the Barratt Impulsivity Scale (Barratt, 1965), the "narrow impulsivity" scale (S. B. G. Eysenck & Eysenck, 1977), and the Impulsivity subscale of the Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI) Extraversion scale (H. J. Eysenck & Eysenck , 1965).Impulsivity is one of two closely associated traits that make up the broad personality trait of extraversion, one of the "Big Five" personality traits (McCrae & Costa, 1987). The other component of extraversion 151

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