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Preferred term

inhibitory control  

Definition

  • Broadly speaking, inhibitory control is the ability to suppress the activation, processing, or expression of information that would otherwise interfere with the efficient attainment of a cognitive or behavioral goal. Everyday examples of inhibitory control include a student who must ignore the conversations of her siblings while she is trying to study for an exam, a baseball player who starts to swing at a pitched ball but then attempts to stop his swing, and a small child who must ignore all of the extra visual information when he is searching for Waldo in his Where's Waldo book. [Source: Encyclopedia of Human Development; Inhibitory Control]

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https://concepts.sagepub.com/social-science/concept/inhibitory_control

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