

Stopping an already initiated response is vital for adaptive everyday behavior. Reactive response inhibition: importance in daily life and measurements Consequently, self-relevant avatars may be used when an increase in commitment is desirable such as in therapeutic or training settings. These results indicate that increasing the degree to which people identify with a cognitive task may induce them to exert greater, reactive inhibitory control. In those participants, the degree of subjectively experienced that self-relevance was associated with improvement in stopping performance over the course of the experiment. In both experiments, the manipulation of self-relevance was effective in a majority of participants as indicated by self-report on the Player-Identification-Scale, and the effect was strongest in participants that completed the self-relevance block first. Each participant completed one block of trials with enhanced self-relevance and one block without enhanced self-relevance, with block order counterbalanced. Both methods create a motivational pull that has been shown to increase motivation and identification. Self-relevance was manipulated by allowing participants to customize their game avatar (Experiment 1) or by introducing a premade, self-referential avatar (Experiment 2). We measured stopping capabilities using a gamified version of the stop-signal paradigm. We test the influence of self-relevance on stopping specifically if increased self-relevance enhances reactive response inhibition. One important aspect of cognitive control is the ability to stop a response in progress and motivational aspects, such as self-relevance, which may be able to influence this ability.
