Resisting distraction and response inhibition trigger similar enhancements of future performance

•Similar sequential-trial effects operate in Stroop-like and stop-signal tasks.•Resisting distraction improves subsequent response inhibition.•Response inhibition improves subsequent resistance to distraction.•Perceptual conflict and surprise cannot explain these findings.•These findings integrate two largely independent literatures.

Resisting distraction and response inhibition are crucial aspects of cognitive control. Interestingly, each of these abilities transiently improves just after it is utilized. Competing views differ, however, as to whether utilizing either of these abilities (e.g., resisting distraction) enhances future performance involving the other ability (e.g., response inhibition). To distinguish between these views, we combined a Stroop-like task that requires resisting distraction with a restraint variant of the stop-signal task that requires response inhibition. We observed similar sequential-trial effects (i.e., performance enhancements) following trials in which participants (a) resisted distraction (i.e., incongruent go trials) and (b) inhibited a response (i.e., congruent stop trials). First, the congruency effect in go trials, which indexes overall distractibility, was smaller after both incongruent go trials and congruent stop trials than it was after congruent go trials. Second, stop failures were less frequent after both incongruent go trials and congruent stop trials than after congruent go trials. A control experiment ruled out the possibility that perceptual conflict or surprise engendered by occasional stop signals triggers sequential-trial effects independent of stopping. Thus, our findings support a novel, integrated view in which resisting distraction and response inhibition trigger similar sequential enhancements of future performance.