The Relationship Between Inhibitory Control and Working Memory and Its Underlying Neural Mechanism

Abstract

Both working memory (WM) and inhibitory control (IC) are the cognitive abilities required for information processing, which have been explored frequently by predecessors. In the classic multicomponent working memory model, the phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, and the central executive are three components of working memory. Inhibitory control, also an important ability for problem solving, refers to an attentional control and a response control. As WM is a fundamental resource playing an important role in attributing to other cognition capacities, it is significant to study its mechanism. Such mechanisms have been widely examined by numbers of WM tasks and IC measurements in behaviorism and neuroimaging. Although a number of mechanisms have been proposed in psychology and neurology, there is still no consensus theory to explain the nature of WM and the connection between WM and IC. This review summarized relative to research on the development of the individual, finding a certain association between working memory, inhibitory control, and problem solving. As for the individual with a mental disorder, we suggested that deficient inhibitory control capacity may deteriorate working memory performance. Regarding the neural mechanism, we reviewed studies conducted by fMRI or EEG, finding that working memory and inhibitory control are two independent capacities with some correlations from the view of brain areas. With respect to how IC affects WM, we reviewed research based on EEG and eye dilation and found that updating, a core executive WM functions, is often associated with IC. For future research, as we suggested, causation studies, rather than correlation ones, are significant to better understand the relationship between working memory and inhibitory control. Moreover, more attention is supposed to be paid to the development and trace studies instead of only concentrating on cross-sectional comparisons. By and large, to better understand human's cognition activities, it is significant to encode the mechanism of WM and investigate the relationship between WM and IC.