Abstract
Proactive inhibition – the anticipation of having to stop a response – relies on objective information contained in cue‐related contingencies in the environment, as well as on the subjective interpretation derived from these cues. To date, most studies of brain areas underlying proactive inhibition have exclusively considered the objective predictive value of environmental cues, by varying the probability of stop‐signals. However, by only taking into account the effect of different cues on brain activation, the subjective component of how cues affect behavior is ignored. We used a modified stop‐signal response task that includes a measurement for subjective expectation, to investigate the effect of this subjective interpretation. After presenting a cue indicating the probability that a stop‐signal will occur, subjects were asked whether they expected a stop‐signal to occur. Furthermore, response time was used to retrospectively model brain activation related to stop‐expectation. We found more activation during the cue period for 50% stop‐signal probability, when contrasting with 0%, in the mid and inferior frontal gyrus, inferior parietal lobe and putamen. When contrasting expected vs. unexpected trials, we found modest effects in the mid frontal gyrus, parietal, and occipital areas. With our third contrast, we modeled brain activation during the cue with trial‐by‐trial variances in response times. This yielded activation in the putamen, inferior parietal lobe, and mid frontal gyrus. Our study is the first to use the behavioral effects of proactive inhibition to identify the underlying brain regions, by employing an unbiased task‐design that temporally separates cue and response.
Highlights
Anticipating future events is a fundamental hallmark of higher‐order cognitive control, as it serves to improve performance and aid survival
When contrasting the cues indicating a stop‐signal probability of 50% with those indicating 0% stop‐signal probability, we found activation in mid and inferior frontal gyrus, inferior parietal lobe and putamen (Figure 4a), indicating that these areas are involved with the possible inhibition of a future response or the processing of environmental cues
We found that activation in the mid frontal gyrus, inferior parietal lobe and right putamen positively correlated with response time (Figure 4c)
Summary
Anticipating future events is a fundamental hallmark of higher‐order cognitive control, as it serves to improve performance and aid survival. We found that while the cues objectively represented an average stop‐signal likelihood, subjects varied in their subjective expectation whether or not a stop‐signal will occur and in the amount of proactive inhibitory control (Zandbelt et al, 2013) Using this approach, we were able to show for the first time that activation in the striatum, SMA, PMd, and midbrain is related to the subjective expectation of having to stop a response. We take a much simpler approach of investigating proactive inhibition by parametrically modeling brain activation during the cue period based on response speed during the actual stimulus and response period This allows us to use trial‐to‐trial variations in response speed as indicator of the amount of proactive inhibitory control that is being engaged independent from the general stop‐signal probability context as indicated by the cue. We will be able to remove unexplained noise that is left in our data when contrasting brain activation for the two cues, or taking into account expressed subjective experience and contrasting expected versus unexpected stop‐signals
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