Inhibitory Control

Inhibitory control is one of the three core executive functions identified by Miyake and colleagues (2000), alongside working memory updating and cognitive flexibility. It refers to the ability to deliberately override a dominant, automatic response when that response conflicts with the current goal. Inhibitory control is most commonly assessed by go/no-go tasks, stop-signal tasks, and the flanker paradigm. Lower inhibitory control is associated with higher impulsivity, more commission errors, and slower recovery from interference events. In competitive gaming, failures of inhibitory control surface as unnecessary early triggers, impulsive rotations on baited information, and inability to hold a pre-planned line when a low-percentage opportunity appears.

Reference: Miyake et al., 2000. The NeuroRank implementation holds the canonical form and scales interference via task-irrelevant stimulus density.

1. Not pulling the trigger when a teammate crosses your pre-aimed angle in CS2, even though the motor programme to fire is already primed and the target silhouette is present.
2. Resisting the impulse to chase a low-HP target into an unfavourable position in a MOBA when the correct play is a tactical reset.
3. Holding an Overwatch ultimate until the correct moment rather than burning it on the first available target, suppressing the prepotent use-now response.

NeuroRank indexes inhibitory control through two modules. In the Reaction module, go/no-go commission errors are the direct measure: every false alarm on a no-go trial represents a failure of response inhibition. In the Composure module, the flanker interference effect captures the capacity to filter competing spatial cues. Both signals feed the Decision Quality and Composure dimension scores respectively.