Journal
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 41, Issue 42, Pages 8826-8838Publisher
SOC NEUROSCIENCE
DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1105-21.2021
Keywords
attentional capture; EEG; EMG; inhibitory control; motor inhibition; stop signal task
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation Career Grant [1752355]
- National Institutes of Health [R01 NS102201]
- Direct For Social, Behav & Economic Scie
- Division Of Behavioral and Cognitive Sci [1752355] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The study focuses on the cognitive and neural processes involved in action-stopping, finding that both ignore signals and stop signals can induce early inhibitory effects on corticospinal excitability and EMG, with unique neural activity related to stop signals emerging at a later stage.
The ability to stop an already initiated action is paramount to adaptive behavior. Much scientific debate in the field of human action-stopping currently focuses on two interrelated questions. (1) Which cognitive and neural processes uniquely underpin the implementation of inhibitory control when actions are stopped after explicit stop signals, and which processes are instead commonly evoked by all salient signals, even those that do not require stopping? (2) Why do purported (neuro) physiological signatures of inhibition occur at two different latencies after stop signals? Here, we address both questions via two preregistered experiments that combined measurements of corticospinal excitability, EMG, and whole-scalp EEG. Adult human subjects performed a stop signal task that also contained ignore signals: equally salient signals that did not require stopping but rather completion of the Go response. We found that both stop- and ignore signals produced equal amounts of early-latency inhibition of corticospinal excitability and EMG, which took place -150 ms following either signal. Multivariate pattern analysis of the whole-scalp EEG data further corroborated that this early processing stage was shared between stopand ignore signals, as neural activity following the two signals could not be decoded from each other until a later time period. In this later period, unique activity related to stop signals emerged at frontocentral scalp sites, reflecting an increased stop signal P3. These findings suggest a two-step model of action-stopping, according to which an initial, universal inhibitory response to the saliency of the stop signal is followed by a slower process that is unique to outright stopping.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available