There is growing interest in methods for conditioning automatic inhibition with specific stimuli and the potential clinical implications of these methods. For example, OCD patients were shown to benefit from a computerized training program which aimed to create an association between OCD-related cues and stopping behaviors. In the current study, we aimed to investigate the ability to condition inhibition to specific stimuli and whether such conditioning can be generalized between tasks to last over time. Participants completed 6 training sessions using a novel version of the stop-signal task, the ‘conditioning automatic inhibition task’ (CAIT), over a 48 -h period, in which one randomly chosen color patch was associated with inhibition. The classic Stroop task was administered before and after the CAIT training. Results yielded smaller congruency and interference effects in the Stroop task after training, but only for the color that was associated with stopping. These results demonstrate the effect of the CAIT onto one specific stimulus, and that the effect generalized between the training and testing tasks. This provides novel evidence that the CAIT can be used to facilitate faster recruitment of inhibitory resources for a specific trained stimulus, which might later help resolve cognitive conflicts that require inhibition and might also have important clinical implications.

人们对利用特定刺激调节自动抑制的方法以及这些方法的潜在临床意义越来越感兴趣。例如，显示强迫症患者受益于计算机培训程序，该程序旨在在强迫症相关提示与停止行为之间建立联系。在当前的研究中，我们旨在研究对特定刺激进行条件抑制的能力，以及这种条件是否可以在任务之间持久化。参与者在48小时内使用新颖的停止信号任务“条件自动抑制任务”（CAIT）完成了6次培训，其中一个随机选择的色块与抑制相关。经典的Stroop任务是在CAIT培训前后进行的。训练后，结果在Stroop任务中产生较小的一致性和干扰效果，但仅针对与停止相关的颜色。这些结果证明了CAIT对一种特定刺激的影响，并且这种影响在训练和测试任务之间普遍存在。这提供了新的证据，表明CAIT可用于促进针对特定训练刺激的抑制性资源的更快招募，这以后可能有助于解决需要抑制的认知冲突，并且也可能具有重要的临床意义。