Abstract
A reward or punishment can modulate motivation and emotions, which in turn affect cognitive processing. The present simultaneous functional magnetic resonance imaging-electroencephalography study examines neural mechanisms of response inhibition under the influence of a monetary reward or punishment by implementing a modified stop-signal task in a virtual battlefield scenario. The participants were instructed to play as snipers who open fire at a terrorist target but withhold shooting in the presence of a hostage. The participants performed the task under three different feedback conditions in counterbalanced order: a reward condition where each successfully withheld response added a bonus (i.e., positive feedback) to the startup credit, a punishment condition where each failure in stopping deduced a penalty (i.e., negative feedback), and a no-feedback condition where response outcome had no consequences and served as a control setting. Behaviorally both reward and punishment conditions led to significantly down-regulated inhibitory function in terms of the critical stop-signal delay. As for the neuroimaging results, increased activities were found for the no-feedback condition in regions previously reported to be associated with response inhibition, including the right inferior frontal gyrus and the pre-supplementary motor area. Moreover, higher activation of the lingual gyrus, posterior cingulate gyrus (PCG) and inferior parietal lobule were found in the reward condition, while stronger activation of the precuneus gyrus was found in the punishment condition. The positive feedback was also associated with stronger changes of delta, theta, and alpha synchronization in the PCG than were the negative or no-feedback conditions. These findings depicted the intertwining relationship between response inhibition and motivation networks.
Highlights
Motivation plays an essential role in human behaviors
We extract the components of the artifact manually, and after that, we investigate the grouping of components based on K-means standards and dipole-fitting coordinates to identify the best cluster of components
In the Stop trials, we found that critical SSD (cSSD) is significantly longer in the no-feedback condition (182 ms) than in the reward (177 ms; p < 0.05) and punishment (176 ms; p < 0.05) conditions
Summary
Motivation plays an essential role in human behaviors. A significant amount of studies have revealed that the reward prospect has noticeable effects on a range of cognitive functions such as working memory (Gilbert and Fiez, 2004; Beck et al, 2010), memory development (Adcock et al, 2006), and visual attention (Krebs et al, 2009; Padmala and Pessoa, 2011; Stoppel et al, 2011; Schevernels et al, 2014). Many extant studies attempted to modulate motivation by using a cue representing a reward conditional on the correct response in the upcoming task (Knutson et al, 2000; Rosell-Negre et al, 2014) Cognitive functions such as action–effect binding (Krebs et al, 2009) and conflict adaptation (Braem et al, 2012) can be changed for separate reward trials in a retarded situation. Response inhibition refers to the suppression of a to-be-executed action and is generally considered to be a part of cognitive control, which is essential for adaptive human behaviors It is commonly evaluated with the stop-signal task, in which participants are instructed to respond to a Go signal by default, but to withhold the response upon the presence of an infrequent Stop signal following the Go signal (see Logan et al, 2014 for an updated review). While a successfully inhibited response has no observable reaction time, a variety of methods considering both the stop signal delay (SSD) and reaction time can be applied to estimate the temporal latency of response inhibition, namely the stop signal response time (SSRT)
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