Abstract
An influential hypothesis from the last decade proposed that regions within the right inferior frontal cortex of the human brain were dedicated to supporting response inhibition. There is growing evidence, however, to support an alternative model, which proposes that neural areas associated with specific inhibitory control tasks co-exist as common network mechanisms, supporting diverse cognitive processes. This meta-analysis of 225 studies comprising 323 experiments examined the common and distinct neural correlates of cognitive processes for response inhibition, namely interference resolution, action withholding, and action cancellation. Activation coordinates for each subcategory were extracted using multilevel kernel density analysis (MKDA). The extracted activity patterns were then mapped onto the brain functional network atlas to derive the common (i.e., process-general) and distinct (i.e., domain-oriented) neural network correlates of these processes. Independent of the task types, activation of the right hemispheric regions (inferior frontal gyrus, insula, median cingulate, and paracingulate gyri) and superior parietal gyrus was common across the cognitive processes studied. Mapping the activation patterns to a brain functional network atlas revealed that the fronto-parietal and ventral attention networks were the core neural systems that were commonly engaged in different processes of response inhibition. Subtraction analyses elucidated the distinct neural substrates of interference resolution, action withholding, and action cancellation, revealing stronger activation in the ventral attention network for interference resolution than action inhibition. On the other hand, action withholding/cancellation primarily engaged the fronto-striatal circuit. Overall, our results suggest that response inhibition is a multidimensional cognitive process involving multiple neural regions and networks for coordinating optimal performance. This finding has significant implications for the understanding and assessment of response inhibition.
Highlights
Response inhibition refers to the ability to suppress automatic actions or behaviors that are not appropriate or no longer adaptive to the situation (Aron 2007; GoldmanRakic et al 1996)
Independent of the task types, activation of the right hemispheric regions and superior parietal gyrus was common across the cognitive processes studied
Through synthesizing data from different tasks tapping into response inhibition, we found that brain areas such as the right inferior frontal gyrus and anterior insula, which are distributed throughout the fronto-parietal network, as well as areas such as the right median cingulate and paracingulate gyri (MCG) in the ventral attentional network, are commonly activated in all of the tasks which we included
Summary
Response inhibition refers to the ability to suppress automatic actions or behaviors that are not appropriate or no longer adaptive to the situation (Aron 2007; GoldmanRakic et al 1996). Brain Struct Funct (2017) 222:3973–3990 neural correlates in the healthy population could enhance our knowledge of cognitive neural networks and offer a unique platform for identifying and clinically addressing neural markers of dysfunctional response inhibition Paradigms such as the stroop, Flanker, Simon, stimulus response compatibility (SRC), antisaccade tasks, stop signal, and Go/NoGo tasks, which require a response to a target stimulus among irrelevant/distracting stimuli, are commonly regarded as paradigms that involve inhibitory action control (Nigg 2000) and are commonly used for the investigation of response inhibition mechanisms (Nee et al 2007; van Velzen et al 2014; Swick et al 2011; Stahl et al 2014; Nigg 2000). In the other tasks, which can be organized under the term ‘‘incongruency tasks’’ (Cieslik et al 2015), a given stimulus dimension interferes with relevant stimuli and/or response information, thereby affecting responses to the relevant information
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