Face the (trigger) failure: Trigger failures strongly drive the effect of reward on response inhibition

Abstract

Response inhibition is typically understood as the ability to stop inappropriate actions and is often investigated using the stop-signal task, in which a go response, triggered by a go signal, has to be inhibited upon the onset of a stop signal. In this task, response inhibition has been formalized as a race between a go and a stop process, which allows the latency of the stop process (stop-signal reaction time; SSRT) to be estimated. Yet, non-parametric SSRT estimations assume that the stop process is initiated without fail, which appears problematic as it is known that participants fail to do so on a subset of trials (“trigger failures”). Importantly, non-parametric methods systematically overestimate SSRT when trigger failures are present, and a growing literature is demonstrating that reported SSRT differences between groups and individuals are also (or rather) driven by differential trigger-failure rates. In the present study, we extend this line of research to a within-individual manipulation, namely the influence of reward on stop performance. We first reanalyzed four data sets of studies that had reported a facilitating effect of stimulus-based reward on SSRTs. Reanalyzing this data, we found that reward decreased the rates of trigger failures. When accounting for these differential trigger-failure rates, the effect of reward on SSRTs (i.e., stop latency) appeared to be virtually abolished. We then conducted a preregistered online follow-up study, implementing a typical block-based reward manipulation. The results of this study indicated simultaneous reward effects on trigger-failure rates and on SSRT. In sum, the present results indicate that trigger failures are an important source of variance in response inhibition, dovetailing with an evolving multicomponential view of response inhibition.