Journal
CEREBRAL CORTEX
Volume 19, Issue 4, Pages 839-848Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS INC
DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhn132
Keywords
amygdala; frontolimbic; limbic; risk taking; ventromedial prefrontal
Categories
Funding
- Clinician Scientist in Substance Abuse Research
- National Institute on Drug Abuse
- [R01]
- Alcoholic Beverage Medical Research Foundation
- Clinical Translational Science Award from the Yale Clinical Center of Investigation
- Department of Mental Health and Addictions Services
- Psychotherapy Development Center of Yale University.
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The stop signal task (SST) is widely used to explore neural processes involved in cognitive control. By randomly intermixing stop and go trials and imposing on participants to respond quickly to the go but not the stop signal, the SST also introduces an indirect element of risk, which participants may avert by slowing down or ignore by responding as usual, during go trials. This risk-taking component of the SST has to our knowledge never been investigated. The current study took advantage of variability of go trial reaction time (RT) and compared the post-go go trials that showed a decrease in RT (risk-taking decision) and those post-go go trials that showed an increase in RT (risk-aversive decision) in 33 healthy individuals who underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging during the SST. This contrast revealed robust activation in bilateral visual cortices as well as left inferior parietal and posterior cingulate cortices, amygdala, and middle frontal gyrus (P < 0.05, family-wise error [FWE] corrected). Furthermore, we observed that the magnitude of amygdala activity is positively correlated with trait anxiety of the participants. These results thus delineated, for the first time, a neural analog of risk taking during stop signal performance, highlighting a novel aspect and broadening the utility of this behavioral paradigm.
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