INHIBITION AND RESISTANCE TO INTERFERENCE

Imagine that you are reviewing for your examinations tomorrow then your thoughts drift to what you are going to do tonight like going out with friends after you review. If you let those thoughts intrude in your reviewing, you will wind up at the end having no idea of what you just read, although perhaps knowing that pizza and beer are in your near future.

To keep these  thoughts out of consciousness requires an active process of inhibition.

  

By the way, what do we mean by INHIBITION?

Inhibition refers to the ability to prevent making some cognitive or behavioral response.

            A study by Diamond, Taylor, & Harnishfeger stated that children’s abilities to inhibit preferred or well established responses and to keep intrusive thoughts out of mind plays an important role in cognitive development.

            The second term is RESISTANCE TO INTERFERENCE.

            It refers to susceptibility to performance decrements under conditions of multiple distracting stimuli.

            Resistance to interference is the ability to ignore irrelevant information so that it does not impede task performance. Here’s another example:

When you are performing a task (reviewing) and it interferes with performing a             second task (eating), one must focus on central information (studying) and ignore                 peripheral information (eating).

           

Remember that:

Children sometimes have difficulty inhibiting their behavior, thoughts, & when they do more so than is typical for their age, it can result in problems in their schoolwork and social relation. Also, Inhibition abilities continue to develop over early childhood and into adolescence and are assessed by a variety of simple test.

So how about you? Can you eliminate the distractions in your surroundings and focus more on your task or not? You can share it in the comment box!