Neuropsychological inhibition has been operationalized by a number of cognitive paradigms that measure the ability to inhibit a behavior, stop a response once it has been initiated, or delay the choice of a rewarding item. Commonly, stop tasks or go/no-go tasks have been used to quantify neuropsychological inhibition. During a stop task in which a subject is instructed to respond as quickly as possible only on trials with a no-stop tone, children with a family history of AUD were slower in responding and also had difficulty suppressing responses to stop tones (Nigg et al. 2004). Using a go/no-go task, Saunders et al. (2008) found that high risk offspring with a greater tendency toward impulsivity and norm violation were more likely to make commission errors. BOLD activation in the middle frontal gyrus during response inhibition on a go/no-go task has been shown to be decreased among high risk offspring (Schweinsburg et al. 2004).
