scholarly journals The P300 as marker of inhibitory control – fact or fiction?

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
René J. Huster ◽  
Mari S. Messel ◽  
Christina Thunberg ◽  
Liisa Raud

AbstractInhibitory control, i.e., the ability to stop or suppress actions, thoughts, or memories, represents a prevalent and popular concept in basic and clinical neuroscience as well as psychology. At the same time, it is notoriously difficult to study as successful inhibition is characterized by the absence of a continuously quantifiable direct behavioral marker. It has been suggested that the P3 latency, and here especially its onset latency, may serve as neurophysiological marker of inhibitory control as it correlates with the stop signal reaction time (SSRT). The SSRT estimates the average stopping latency, which itself is unobservable since no overt response is elicited in successful stop trials, based on differences in the distribution of go reaction times and the delay of the stop- relative to the go-signal in stop trials.In a meta-analysis and an independent EEG experiment, we found that correlations between the P3-latency and the SSRT are indeed replicable, but also unspecific. Not only does the SSRT also correlate with the N2-latency, but both P3- and N2-latency measures show similar or even higher correlations with other behavioral parameters such as the go reaction time or stopping accuracy. The missing specificity of P3-SSRT correlations, together with the general pattern of associations, suggests that these manifest effects are driven by underlying latent processes other than inhibition, such as those associated with the speed-accuracy trade-off.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Monk ◽  
Adam Qureshi ◽  
Charlotte Rebecca Pennington ◽  
Iain Hamlin

BackgroundPrior research demonstrates that individuals who consume alcohol show diminished inhibitory control towards alcohol-related cues. However, such research contrasts predominantly alcoholic appetitive cues with non-alcoholic, non-appetitive cues (e.g., stationary items). As such, it is not clear whether it is specifically the alcoholic nature of the cues that influences impairments in inhibitory control or whether more general appetitive processes are at play.AimsThe current study examined the hitherto untested assertion that the disinhibiting effects of alcohol-related stimuli might generalise to other appetitive liquid stimuli, but not to non-appetitive liquid stimuli.MethodFifty-nine participants (Mage = 21.63, SD = 5.85) completed a modified version of the Stop Signal Task, which exposed them to visual stimuli of three types of liquids: Alcoholic appetitive (e.g., wine), non-alcoholic appetitive (e.g., water) and non-appetitive (e.g., washing-up liquid).ResultsConsistent with predictions, Stop-signal reaction time was significantly longer for appetitive (alcoholic, non-alcoholic) compared to non-appetitive stimuli. Participants were also faster and less error-prone when responding to appetitive relative to non-appetitive stimuli on go-trials. There were no apparent differences in stop signal reaction times between alcoholic and non-alcoholic appetitive products.ConclusionsThese findings suggest that decreases in inhibitory control in response to alcohol-related cues might generalise to other appetitive liquids, possibly due to evaluative conditioning. Implications for existing research methodologies include the use of appetitive control conditions and the diversification of cues within tests of alcohol-related inhibitory control.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teppei Matsui ◽  
Yoshiki Hattori ◽  
Kaho Tsumura ◽  
Ryuta Aoki ◽  
Masaki Takeda ◽  
...  

In real life, humans make decisions by taking into account multiple independent factors, such as delay and probability. Cognitive psychology suggests that cognitive control mechanisms play a key role when facing such complex task conditions. However, in value-based decision-making, it still remains unclear to what extent cognitive control mechanisms become essential when the task condition is complex. In this study, we investigated decision-making behaviors and underlying neural mechanisms using a multifactor gambling task where participants simultaneously considered probability and delay. Decision-making behavior in the multifactor task was modulated by both probability and delay. The behavioral effect of probability was stronger than delay, consistent with previous studies. Furthermore, in a subset of conditions that recruited fronto-parietal activations, reaction times were paradoxically elongated despite lower probabilistic uncertainty. Notably, such a reaction time elongation did not occur in control tasks involving single factors. Meta-analysis of brain activations suggested an association between the paradoxical increase of reaction time and strategy switching. Together, these results suggest a novel aspect of complex value-based decision-makings that is strongly influenced by fronto-parietal cognitive control.


2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (S1) ◽  
pp. S44-S44
Author(s):  
G. Rudio

Alcohol dependence is a chronic disorder with frequent relapses during recovery. Most studies have pointed out that craving is the main process involved in relapse, but recently other factors have been implicated in it, such as attentional bias and impulsivity. Some authors consider that different stages could be involved in the relapse process, and each may be governed by different mechanisms: Attentional bias; motivational response to alcohol cues and inhibitory control.Motivationally salient cues attract and hold selective attention, and this “attentional bias, (AB)” is related to individual differences in appetitive and aversive motivation. In a recent review, attentional bias has been shown to be significantly present in alcohol-dependent and is associated with craving and risk to a relapse in alcohol consumption.In alcohol-dependent subjects, alcohol-related cues reach a very high motivational valence (Motivational response, MR), which, in effect, increases craving for alcohol and activates behavioral strategies towards alcohol intake. One method used to assess motivational valence of alcohol is the craving self-assessment. In addition, in recent years, the affective modulation of the startle reflex has been used as an objective measure of craving. It has been shown that subjects with a low baseline startle response when viewing alcohol-associated pictures are at major risk of relapse compared to those with increased reactions.Once alcohol craving has appeared, the subject will either drink or not, depending on his ability to resist his behavior towards alcohol consumption (impulsivity or inhibitory control, IC). Moreover, subjects that exhibit greater impulsivity are those more likely to relapse.Our group has recently conducted a study on a sample of 172 alcohol-dependent patients seen in outpatient therapeutic program during 12 weeks. All of them were assessed with the following measures: Attentional bias was assessed using the dot task, motivational response was evaluated using the affective modulation of the startle reflex paradigm, inhibitory control was assessed by the stop-signal reaction time task. Alcohol relapse variables were: relapse, days to the first relapse and days of accumulated abstinence.One of the most relevant results was that processes related to inhibitory control (Stop-signal reaction time and attentional bias) were the most relevant measures to explain variables related to relapse in alcohol consumption during the treatment period.Our results support the use of assessment strategies, therapeutic and pharmacological inhibtoria aimed at improving the ability of serious alcohol-dependent patients.Disclosure of interestThe author has not supplied his declaration of competing interest.


2011 ◽  
Vol 106 (2) ◽  
pp. 809-816 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Albares ◽  
Marion Criaud ◽  
Claire Wardak ◽  
Song Chi Trung Nguyen ◽  
Suliann Ben Hamed ◽  
...  

Standard protocols testing the orientation of visuospatial attention usually present spatial cues before targets and compare valid-cue trials with invalid-cue trials. The valid/invalid contrast results in a relative behavioral or physiological difference that is generally interpreted as a benefit of attention orientation. However, growing evidence suggests that inhibitory control of response is closely involved in this kind of protocol that requires the subjects to withhold automatic responses to cues, probably biasing behavioral and physiological baselines. Here, we used two experiments to disentangle the inhibitory control of automatic responses from orienting of visuospatial attention in a saccadic reaction time task in humans, a variant of the classical cue-target detection task and a sustained visuospatial attentional task. Surprisingly, when referring to a simple target detection task in which there is no need to refrain from reacting to avoid inappropriate responses, we found no consistent evidence of facilitation of target detection at the attended location. Instead, we observed a cost at the unattended location. Departing from the classical view, our results suggest that reaction time measures of visuospatial attention probably relie on the attenuation of elementary processes involved in visual target detection and saccade initiation away from the attended location rather than on facilitation at the attended location. This highlights the need to use proper control conditions in experimental designs to disambiguate relative from absolute cueing benefits on target detection reaction times, both in psychophysical and neurophysiological studies.


2017 ◽  
Vol 372 (1718) ◽  
pp. 20160202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Schmidt ◽  
Joshua D. Berke

Many studies have implicated the basal ganglia in the suppression of action impulses (‘stopping’). Here, we discuss recent neurophysiological evidence that distinct hypothesized processes involved in action preparation and cancellation can be mapped onto distinct basal ganglia cell types and pathways. We examine how movement-related activity in the striatum is related to a ‘Go’ process and how going may be modulated by brief epochs of beta oscillations. We then describe how, rather than a unitary ‘Stop’ process, there appear to be separate, complementary ‘Pause’ and ‘Cancel’ mechanisms. We discuss the implications of these stopping subprocesses for the interpretation of the stop-signal reaction time—in particular, some activity that seems too slow to causally contribute to stopping when assuming a single Stop processes may actually be fast enough under a Pause-then-Cancel model. Finally, we suggest that combining complementary neural mechanisms that emphasize speed or accuracy respectively may serve more generally to optimize speed–accuracy trade-offs. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Movement suppression: brain mechanisms for stopping and stillness’.


1997 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon D. Logan ◽  
Russell J. Schachar ◽  
Rosemary Tannock

We report an experiment testing the hypothesis that impulsive behavior reflects a deficit in the ability to inhibit prepotent responses Specifically, we examined whether impulsive people respond more slowly to signals to inhibit (stop signals) than non-impulsive people In this experiment, 136 undergraduate students completed an impulsivity questionnaire and then participated in a stop-signal experiment, in which they performed a choice reaction time (go) task and were asked to inhibit their responses to the go task when they heard a stop signal The delay between the go signal and the stop signal was determined by a tracking procedure designed to allow subjects to inhibit on 50% of the stop-signal trials Reaction time to the go signal did not vary with impulsivity, but estimated stop-signal reaction time was longer in more impulsive subjects, consistent with the hypothesis and consistent with results from populations with pathological problems with impulse control


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kendall Mar ◽  
Parker Townes ◽  
Petros Pechlivanoglou ◽  
Paul Arnold ◽  
Russell James Schachar

This systematic review and meta-analysis updates evidence pertaining to deficient response inhibition in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) as measured by the stop-signal task (SST). We conducted a meta-analysis of the literature to compare response inhibition in patients with OCD and healthy controls, meta-regressions to determine relative influences of age and sex on response inhibition impairment, and a risk of bias assessment for included studies using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (NOS). Stop-signal reaction time (SSRT), which estimates the latency of the stopping process deficit, was significantly longer in OCD samples than in controls, reflecting inferior inhibitory control (Raw mean difference = 23.43ms; p = <0.001; 95% CI = [17.42, 29.45]). We did not observe differences in mean reaction time (MRT) in OCD compared to controls (Raw mean difference = 2.51ms; p = 0.755; 95% CI = [-13.27, 18.30]). Age impacted effect size of SSRT, indicating a greater deficit in older patients than younger ones. We did not observe a significant effect of sex on SSRT or MRT scores.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Michael Thornton ◽  
Todd Steven Horowitz

We used the Multi-Item Localisation (MILO) task to examine search through two sequences. In sequential blocks of trials, six letters and six digits were touched in order. In mixed blocks, participants alternated between letters and digits. These conditions mimic the A and B variants of the Trail Making Test (TMT). In both block types, targets either vanished or remained visible after being touched. There were two key findings. First, in mixed blocks, reaction times exhibited a saw-tooth pattern, suggesting search for successive pairs of targets. Second, reaction time patterns for vanish and remain conditions were identical in sequential blocks -- indicating that participants could ignore past targets – but diverged in mixed blocks. This suggests a breakdown of inhibitory tagging. Introducing the simple vanish/remain manipulation to the context of TMT could thus provide additional diagnostic power to identify individuals with working memory and inhibitory control deficits.


1995 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 929-937 ◽  
Author(s):  
Doug P. Hanes ◽  
Jeffrey D. Schall

AbstractA countermanding paradigm was utilized to investigate the regulation of saccade initiation. Two rhesus monkeys were instructed to generate a saccade to a peripheral target; however, on a fraction of trials after a delay, the monkeys were signaled to inhibit saccade initiation. With short delays between the presentation of the target and the signal to inhibit saccade generation, monkeys withheld saccades to the peripheral target. As the delay of the stop signal increased, monkeys increasingly failed to withhold the saccade. The hypothesis that the generation of the saccade is determined by a race between a go and a stop process provides three explicit means of estimating the covert latency of response to the stop signal. This latency, known as stop signal reaction time, was estimated to be on average 82 ms for both monkeys. Because the stop signal latency represents the time required to exert inhibitory control over saccade production, the countermanding paradigm will be useful for studying neural mechanisms that regulate saccade initiation.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Soraya Lage de Sá Canabarro ◽  
Cássia Karolina Paniago ◽  
Priscilla Magalhães Santos ◽  
Lorena da Silva Rosa ◽  
Vitória Espíndola Leite Borges ◽  
...  

AbstractBackgroundAnodal transcranial direct current stimulation (a-tDCS) has been shown to promote performance improvement of normal individuals in tests of executive function, including tasks that demand sustained attention and inhibitory control. The presumed mechanism is facilitation of prefrontal cortex activation, since a-tDCS is thought to increase cortical excitability. Only a few studies, however, have investigated the effects of inhibitory, cathodal tDCS (c-tDCS) on cognitive tasks, and reported results are often inconsistent. Studies about the effects of c-tDCS upon accuracy and reaction times are particularly scant.Objective/HypothesisThis study assessed the effects of inhibitory c-tDCS over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (l-DLPFC) on the performance of neurologically intact young adults in Stroop and reaction time tests.MethodsSeventeen healthy undergraduate students (ten women) performed Stroop and reaction time tasks after delivery of c-tDCS (1 mA, 20 min) over l-DLFPC or a sham session. All subjects underwent both real and sham sessions, which were separated by an interval of one week. We hypothesized that c-tDCS might lead to an impairment of inhibitory control and attention abilities.ResultsWe found an interference effect on the Stroop task and also a ceiling effect on the reaction Time task. There were no statistically significant performance differences in any of the neuropsychological tests as a function of stimulation condition and/or subject gender.ConclusionsC-tDCS over the l-DLPFC of neurologically intact young individuals did not affect performance in Stroop Test accuracy or in reaction times, irrespective of subject gender. These results raise the possibility that c-tDCS inhibitory effects, well documented for the primary motor area, do not necessarily apply to higher order associative areas. The assumption that c-tDCS has inhibitory effects upon any cortical area, common in clinical trials, should be made with caution.


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