With efforts underway to identify more homogenous dispositions to rash action, the next critical step will be to delineate how these different dispositions relate to the different laboratory tasks measuring aspects of behavioral disinhibition. Initial efforts toward this goal are underway, with some preliminary but converging evidence that urgency may relate to prepotent response inhibition, whereas lack of perseverance may relate to resistance to proactive interference. An additional step may be to continue to pursue the development of laboratory tasks that relate to the more recently identified personality processes. For example, is there benefit to developing new, additional laboratory tasks for humans or animals that might reflect emotion-based rash action? The final critical step will be to identify how these questionnaire and laboratory based measures from human studies relate to the tasks used to measure impulsivity in animal studies. We note that even though the most obvious parallels are between human laboratory-based tests of impulsivity and animal measures of impulsivity, performance on laboratory tasks in humans is more readily discussed as reflecting both ‘trait-based’ personality facets, as well as cognitive
