Abstract
Over the last two decades, inhibitory control has featured prominently in accounts of how humans and other organisms regulate their behaviour and thought. Previous work on how the brain stops actions and thoughts, however, has emphasised distinct prefrontal regions supporting these functions, suggesting domain-specific mechanisms. Here we show that stopping actions and thoughts recruits common regions in the right dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex to suppress diverse content, via dynamic targeting. Within each region, classifiers trained to distinguish action-stopping from action-execution also identify when people are suppressing their thoughts (and vice versa). Effective connectivity analysis reveals that both prefrontal regions contribute to action and thought stopping by targeting the motor cortex or the hippocampus, depending on the goal, to suppress their task-specific activity. These findings support the existence of a domain-general system that underlies inhibitory control and establish Dynamic Targeting as a mechanism enabling this ability.
Highlights
Over the last two decades, inhibitory control has featured prominently in accounts of how humans and other organisms regulate their behaviour and thought
Our analysis builds on evidence that two regions of the right lateral prefrontal cortex (rLPFC) may contribute to stopping both actions and thoughts: the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
The whole-brain voxel-wise conjunction analysis of the Stop > Go and the No-Think > Think contrasts revealed that both motor and thought inhibition evoked conjoint activations in the right prefrontal cortex (PFC), the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (rDLPFC), right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (rVLPFC), precentral gyrus, and supplementary motor area
Summary
Stopping thoughts and stopping representations related to both the ability to stop actions & thoughts don't press!. During the action stopping scanning blocks, participants engaged in a speeded motor response task that, on a minority of trials, required them to stop their key-press following an auditory stop signal. We predicted that the reminder would activate the associated thought, triggering inhibitory control to suppress hippocampal retrieval[1,65]. We predicted that this disruption would hinder later retrieval of the thought, causing suppression-induced forgetting. We isolated prefrontal regions that were more active during the action and thought stopping, compared to their respective control conditions (e.g., “Go” trials, wherein participants made the cued action; or Think trials, wherein they retrieved the cued thought) and performed a within-subjects conjunction analysis on these activations. We used multi-voxel activation patterns a Stop-signal task
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