Stop the clock because I can’t stop: time pressure, but not monitoring pressure, impairs response inhibition performance

ABSTRACT

Psychological pressure can exert detrimental effects on cognitive tasks that depend on attentional control. However, the effect of psychological pressure on inhibitory cognitive processes has been relatively overlooked. The study purpose was to examine the effect of psychological pressure on response inhibition. In Experiment 1, participants (N = 125) were assigned to a combined time and performance-based incentive pressure condition or control condition. In Experiment 2, participants (N = 124) were allocated to a time pressure only or control condition. Participants (N = 149) in Experiment 3 were assigned to either an explicit monitoring pressure condition in which their performance was video-recorded or control condition. Participants in all experiments completed a Go/NoGo Task to assess response inhibition performance. Pressure impaired performance in Experiments 1 and 2 but not Experiment 3. The results demonstrate that time pressure, but not explicit monitoring pressure, significantly impairs inhibition accuracy. These findings are consistent with the distraction theory of performance pressure.

KEYWORDS:

• Response inhibition
• performance pressure
• distraction theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available on the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/hty9d

Notes

1 When the results of Experiment 1 are analysed without any exclusions, the significant effects for NoGo accuracy remain the same as those reported in the Results section.

2 The rate of non-response outliers was greater in Experiment 1 (15.54%) than in both Experiments 2 (9.33%) and 3 (8.47%).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by the Clemson University Creative Inquiry Program.