New perspectives on interference and inhibition in cognition: Final comments

Publisher Summary This chapter summarizes the various diverse topics and research agendas associated with interference and inhibition. These topics range from efforts to understand the history of research on interference and human evolution to a most recent development—namely, neural network models. It reviews work on infancy, cognitive development, and cognitive aging. Some new ideas have been presented that link interference and inhibition to fundamental processes of cognition—specifically, selective attention, reasoning, recall, and memory suggestibility. Thus, there is diversity with respect to substantive issues, paradigms, the types of interference and inhibition studied, and the ages of the subjects that are studied. The range of application of modern psychological concepts of interference and inhibition is very broad indeed. This chapter discusses certain unifying themes and some unresolved issues that suggest directions for future research.

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