The evidence of low associations between inhibitory performance measures and personality traits, such as impulsivity, may not be surprising (cf. de Wit et al., 2007) given that self-report measures reflect participants' assessment of their cognitive and behavioral styles across different (social) contexts, whereas various response inhibition paradigms measure a specific behavior in the laboratory. Another reason for the failure to observe strong correlations between psychometric trait impulsivity and response inhibition may be the role of decision making: The tendency to make rapid disadvantageous decisions may be argued to be at the core of dysfunctional impulsivity, whereas these cognitive mediation processes may play a lesser role in laboratory-based motor response inhibition tasks.
