Applying inhibitory control theories to shoot/don't‐shoot decisions

Biggs, Adam T.

doi:10.1002/acp.3905

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 92 publications

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“…Rather than aiming to improve domain general intelligence or activities of daily living, this work has focused on training one specific aspect of cognitive function to improve a specific behavioural outcome. The clearest example of this approach is the use of inhibition training to improve the suppression of unsuitable responses during shoot/don't-shoot decision making tasks [18,19]. Inhibition is a sub-function of working memory which denotes the capacity to obstruct automatic or instinctive responses when they are not appropriate for the context at hand, such as ignoring a distracting noise or delaying a response to threat [20,21].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can cognitive training capitalise on near transfer effects? Limited evidence of transfer following online inhibition training in a randomised-controlled trial

Harris,

Wilson,

Chillingsworth

et al. 2023

PLoS ONE

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Despite early promise, cognitive training research has failed to deliver consistent real-world benefits and questions have been raised about the experimental rigour of many studies. Several meta-analyses have suggested that there is little to no evidence for transfer of training from computerised tasks to real-world skills. More targeted training approaches that aim to optimise performance on specific tasks have, however, shown more promising effects. In particular, the use of inhibition training for improving shoot/don’t-shoot decision-making has returned positive far transfer effects. In the present work, we tested whether an online inhibition training task could generate near and mid-transfer effects in the context of response inhibition tasks. As there has been relatively little testing of retention effects in the literature to date, we also examined whether any benefits would persist over a 1-month interval. In a pre-registered, randomised-controlled trial, participants (n = 73) were allocated to either an inhibition training programme (six training sessions of a visual search task with singleton distractor) or a closely matched active control task (that omitted the distractor element). We assessed near transfer to a Flanker task, and mid-transfer to a computerised shoot/don’t-shoot task. There was evidence for a near transfer effect, but no evidence for mid-transfer. There was also no evidence that the magnitude of training improvement was related to transfer task performance. This finding adds to the growing body of literature questioning the effectiveness of cognitive training. Given previous positive findings, however, there may still be value in continuing to explore the extent to which cognitive training can capitalise on near or mid-transfer effects for performance optimisation.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%