UC Riverside

Inhibitory control (IC) is the capacity to interrupt an action in order to reach a specific goal. Impulsivity is the tendency to act rashly despite potentially negative consequences. Conceptually, they imply an inverse relationship, but this has not been consistently found in previous research. IC is measured using performance-based tasks, while impulsivity is generally measured using self-report questionnaires, and this format difference has led to issues in previous studies when comparing directly. In chapter one, this problem is addressed by conducting an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) to identify how performance-based measures of IC and questionnaire scores of impulsivity correlate and group together. We identified four factors across 19 total measures of IC and impulsivity. Three factors consisted of measures with significant loadings from impulsivity assessments, while the fourth factor was showing significant loadings from IC tasks, suggesting IC and impulsivity may be separate constructs driven by separate underlying processes. In chapter two, to explore the relationship structure of IC and impulsivity assessments in a novel way, three network analyses were conducted, using 1) IC measures, 2) impulsivity measures, and 3) both IC and impulsivity measures with data from a healthy adult sample. These analyses revealed sub-networks, or “communities,” that were also largely dominated by assessment type, though some overlap across IC and impulsivity was observed in the full model. Chapter three compares a novel, gamified cognitive task based on the traditional cancellation task, with other traditional IC tasks. We found that UCancellation RT-based metrics significantly predicted TOVA RT variability, suggesting its possible utility as a more appealing alternative to the TOVA in certain cases. Ultimately, the results from this dissertation could help inspire future researchers to remove the redundancy of assessments used to measure IC and impulsivity in both research and clinical settings, while also introducing a novel, gamified measure of IC that may serve as a useful alternative to less-engaging traditional cognitive tasks.