A cautionary note on evidence-accumulation models of response inhibition in the stop-signal paradigm

The stop-signal paradigm is a popular procedure to investigate response inhibition–the ability to stop ongoing responses. It consists of a choice response time (RT) task that is occasionally interrupted by a stop stimulus signaling participants to withhold their response. Performance in the stopsignal paradigm is often formalized as race between a set of go runners triggered by the choice stimulus and a stop runner triggered by the stop signal. We investigated whether evidence-accumulation processes, which have been widely used in choice RT analysis, can serve as the runners in the stop-signal race model and support the estimation of psychologically meaningful parameters. We examined two types of the evidence-accumulation architectures: the racing Wald model (Logan, Van Zandt, Verbruggen, & Wagenmakers, 2014) and a novel proposal based on the Lognormal race (Heathcote & Love, 2012). Using a series of simulation studies and fits to empirical data, we found that these models are not measurement models in the sense that the data-generating parameters cannot be recovered in realistic experimental designs.