In Pavlov, inhibition describes any reduction in positive response to a stimulus. This is not necessarily analogous to the use of the term to describe synaptic responses in biological and artificial neural networks.

In biological neurons, inhibition describes a property of a synapse or synaptic response that causes the neuron to be less likely to fire when it is stimulated.

In artificial neural networks, an inhibitory synapse is a synapse, which is usually represented with a negative weight value. The inhibitory synapse modulates the stimulation by the negative weight, causing the neuron's output to become less positive.