Inhibition was believed to play two primary roles: the prevention of unwanted thoughts or behaviors, and the repression of experiences from infancy and childhood.
[2] Freud believed cognitive inhibition was not just a lack of awareness to stimuli, but an active process, requiring a constant energy expenditure.
[2] Other early theories of cognitive inhibition focused on its central developmental mechanisms and were founded by Luria and Vygotsky, two Russian psychologists.
An experiment done by Friedman and Leslie[1] explained children's performance in the false belief task as relying on a critical inhibitory process.
[6] "In situations involving treacherous acts by a caregiver, a 'cognitive information blockage' may occur that results in an isolation of knowledge of the event from awareness".
However, in the case of sexual arousal or perceived aggressive behavior, the individual needs to exercise caution in the cognitive processing of the incoming signals.
When an interaction occurs, cognitive inhibition on the part of the individual causes him or her to respond appropriately and avoid upsetting someone already in physical or emotional pain.
When a degree of cognitive inhibition ability is absent in an individual, it can result in "trait anger", or frequent angry and violent outbursts at relatively inoffensive stimuli.
[citation needed] Many contemporary cognitive theorists postulate models featuring a central pool "of mental resources that must be allocated to the various operations involved in processing, retaining, and reporting information".
Cognitive inhibition, of course, is responsible for determining what is relevant to the working memory and shuts out what is irrelevant, "freeing up space" and mental capacity needed for more pressing matters.
[citation needed] If an individual experiences impaired or damaged cognitive inhibition abilities, the psychological results can be extremely debilitating.
[15] In one meta-analysis involving 164 studies, it was discovered that executive dysfunction and higher cognitive inhibition deficit is positively correlated and more frequently found among patients with suicidal behaviors.
[15] In attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), studies of cognitive control have not emphasized the ability to actively suppress pre-potent mental representations.
[16] This indicates that people diagnosed with ADHD experience an impaired cognitive inhibition ability and find it difficult to suppress irrelevant stimuli.
"[17] When speaking, many older adults experience difficulty "finding" the words they want to use, which is evidence of cognitive inhibition skills not functioning properly.
Because they are not omitting synonyms or replacements entirely from their working memory (which can be considered irrelevant stimuli), they exhibit similar types of mental representation degradation that patients with depression, ADHD, or OCD indicate.