In a letter-naming task, a letter will be named more slowly if it was a distractor on the previous trial This negative priming effect has been instrumental in renewed interest in inhibition The present research explored whether inhibition is a result of controlled attention When the naming task was performed under a mental work load, negative priming was diminished as work load increased This finding suggests that inhibition is a product of controlled resources and that group differences in inhibition may result from differences in controlled attentional resources, not from inefficient inhibitory mechanisms