Automatic Response Tendencies Research Articles

Free will strikes back: Steady-state movement-related cortical potentials are modulated by cognitive control

In psychology and neuroscience, opposition to free will has asserted that any degree of perceived self-control or choice is a mere epiphenomenon which provides no meaningful influence on action. The present research tested the validity of this conclusion by designing a paradigm in which the potential effect of self-monitoring on motor output could be investigated. Using a repetitive finger tapping task that evokes automatic patterns in participants tapping responses, we have obtained evidence that (1) participants may voluntarily reduce the predictability of their tapping patterns (2) by exercising cognitive control that (3) modulates response-locked steady-state movement-related potentials over primary and supplementary motor areas. These findings challenge the most radical accounts of the nonexistence of free will and instead provide support for a more balanced model of human behaviour in which cognitive control may constrain automatic response tendencies in response preparation and action execution.

Cognitive load promotes honesty

In three experiments, we examined the cognitive underpinnings of self-serving dishonesty by manipulating cognitive load under different incentive structures. Participants could increase a financial bonus by misreporting outcomes of private die rolls without any risk of detection. At the same time, they had to remember letter strings of varying length. If honesty is the automatic response tendency and dishonesty is cognitively demanding, lying behavior should be less evident under high cognitive load. This hypothesis was supported by the outcome of two out of three experiments. We further manipulated whether all trials or only one random trial determined payoff to modulate reward adaptation over time (Experiment 2) and whether payoff was framed as a financial gain or loss (Experiment 3). The payoff scheme of one random or all trials did not affect lying behavior and, discordant to earlier research, facing losses instead of gains did not increase lying behavior. Finally, cognitive load and incentive frame interacted significantly, but contrary to our assumption gains increased lying under low cognitive load. While the impact of cognitive load on dishonesty appears to be comparably robust, motivational influences seem to be more elusive than commonly assumed in current theorizing.

Stimulus Reward Value Interacts with Training-induced Plasticity in Inhibitory Control

Training inhibitory control, the ability to suppress motor or cognitive processes, not only enhances inhibition processes, but also reduces the perceived value and behaviors toward the stimuli associated with the inhibition goals during the practice. While these findings suggest that inhibitory control training interacts with the aversive and reward systems, the underlying spatio-temporal brain mechanisms remain unclear. We used electrical neuroimaging analyses of event-related potentials to examine the plastic brain modulations induced by training healthy participants to inhibit their responses to rewarding (pleasant chocolate) versus aversive food pictures (unpleasant vegetables) with Go/NoGo tasks. Behaviorally, the training resulted in a larger improvement in the aversive than in the rewarding NoGo stimuli condition, suggesting that reward responses impede inhibitory control learning. The electrophysiological results also revealed an interaction between reward responses and inhibitory control plasticity: we observed different effects of practice on the rewarding vs. aversive NoGo stimuli at 200 ms post-stimulus onset, when the conflicts between automatic response tendency and task demands for response inhibition are processed. Electrical source analyses revealed that this effect was driven by an increase in right orbito-cingulate and a decrease in temporo-parietal activity to the rewarding NoGo stimuli and the reverse pattern to the aversive stimuli. Our collective results provide direct neurophysiological evidence for interactions between stimulus reward value and executive control training, and suggest that changes in the assessment of stimuli with repeated motoric inhibition likely follow from associative learning and behavior-stimulus conflicts reduction mechanisms.

Emotional Response Inhibition Is Greater in Older Than Younger Adults.

Emotional information rapidly captures our attention and also often invokes automatic response tendencies, whereby positive information motivates approach, while negative information encourages avoidance. However, many circumstances require the need to override or inhibit these automatic responses. Control over responses to emotional information remains largely intact in late life, in spite of age-related declines in cognitive control and inhibition of responses to non-emotional information. The goal of this behavioral study was to understand how the aging process influences emotional response inhibition for positive and negative information in older adults. We examined emotional response inhibition in 36 healthy older adults (ages 60–89) and 44 younger adults (ages 18–22) using an emotional Go/No-Go task presenting happy (positive), fearful (negative), and neutral faces. In both younger and older adults, happy faces produced more approach-related behavior (i.e., fewer misses), while fearful faces produced more avoidance-related behavior, in keeping with theories of approach/avoidance-motivated responses. Calculation of speed/accuracy trade-offs between response times and false alarm rates revealed that younger and older adults both favored speed at the expense of accuracy, most robustly within blocks with fearful faces. However, there was no indication that the strength of the speed/accuracy trade-off differed between younger and older adults. The key finding was that although younger adults were faster to respond to all types of faces, older adults had greater emotional response inhibition (i.e., fewer false alarms). Moreover, younger adults were particularly prone to false alarms for happy faces. This is the first study to directly test effects of aging on emotional response inhibition. Complementing previous literature in the domains of attention and memory, these results provide new evidence that in the domain of response inhibition older adults may more effectively employ emotion regulatory ability, albeit on a slower time course, compared to younger adults. Older adults’ enhanced adaptive emotion regulation strategies may facilitate resistance to emotional distraction. The present study extends the literature of emotional response inhibition in younger adulthood into late life, and in doing so further elucidates how cognitive aging interacts with affective control processes.

Neural Dynamics of Reward-Induced Response Activation and Inhibition.

Reward-predictive stimuli can increase an automatic response tendency, which needs to be counteracted by effortful response inhibition when this tendency is inappropriate for the current task. Here we investigated how the human brain implements this dynamic process by adopting a reward-modulated Simon task while acquiring EEG and fMRI data in separate sessions. In the Simon task, a lateral target stimulus triggers an automatic response tendency of the spatially corresponding hand, which needs to be overcome if the activated hand is opposite to what the task requires, thereby delaying the response. We associated high or low reward with different targets, the location of which could be congruent or incongruent with the correct response hand. High-reward targets elicited larger Simon effects than low-reward targets, suggesting an increase in the automatic response tendency induced by the stimulus location. This tendency was accompanied by modulations of the lateralized readiness potential over the motor cortex, and was inhibited soon after if the high-reward targets were incongruent with the correct response hand. Moreover, this process was accompanied by enhanced theta oscillations in medial frontal cortex and enhanced activity in a frontobasal ganglia network. With dynamical causal modeling, we further demonstrated that the connection from presupplementary motor area (pre-SMA) to right inferior frontal cortex (rIFC) played a crucial role in modulating the reward-modulated response inhibition. Our results support a dynamic neural model of reward-induced response activation and inhibition, and shed light on the neural communication between reward and cognitive control in generating adaptive behaviors.

On the effects of tyrosine supplementation on interference control in a randomized, double-blind placebo-control trial

Exerting cognitive control is an effortful endeavor that is strongly modulated by the availability of dopamine (DA) and norepinephrine (NE), which are both synthesized from the amino acid precursor tyrosine. Supplementing tyrosine may increase the synthesis of both catecholamines. This has been suggested to improve executive functioning and potentially even counteract depletion effects in this domain. Yet, it has remained unclear whether tyrosine also improves interference control and whether subliminally and consciously triggered response conflicts are subject to the same modulation.We investigated this question in a double-blind intra-individual study design. N = 26 young healthy subjects performed two consecutive cognitive control tasks that triggered automatic incorrect response tendencies; once with tyrosine supplementation and once with a placebo. The results show that tyrosine decreased the size of consciously perceived conflicts in a Simon Task, but not a Flanker task, thus suggesting that stimulus–response conflicts might be modulated differently from stimulus–stimulus conflicts. At the same time, tyrosine supplementation increased the size of subliminally triggered conflicts whenever a different, consciously perceived conflict was also present. This suggests that control-related DA and NE release may increase visuo-motor priming, especially when no conflict-specific top-down control may be triggered to counteract subliminal priming effects. Also, these subliminal conflicts might be aggravated by concurrent control investments in other kinds of conflict. Taken together, our data suggest that beneficial effects of tyrosine supplementation do not require depletion effects, but may be limited to situations where we consciously perceive a conflict and the associated need for conflict-specific control.

A model-based quantification of action control deficits in Parkinson's disease

Basal ganglia dysfunction in Parkinson's disease (PD) is thought to generate deficits in action control, but the characterization of these deficits have been qualitative rather than quantitative. Patients with PD typically show prolonged response times on tasks that instantiate a conflict between goal-directed processing and automatic response tendencies. In the Simon task, for example, the irrelevant location of the stimulus automatically activates a corresponding lateralized response, generating a potential conflict with goal-directed choices. We applied a new computational model of conflict processing to two sets of behavioral data from the Simon task to quantify the effects of PD and dopaminergic (DA) medication on action control mechanisms. Compared to healthy controls (HC) matched in age gender and education, patients with PD showed a deficit in goal-directed processing, and the magnitude of this deficit positively correlated with cognitive symptoms. Analyses of the time-course of the location-based automatic activation yielded mixed findings. In both datasets, we found that the peak amplitude of the automatic activation was similar between PD and HC, demonstrating a similar degree of response capture. However, PD patients showed a prolonged automatic activation in only one dataset. This discrepancy was resolved by theoretical analyses of conflict resolution in the Simon task. The reduction of interference generated by the automatic activation appears to be driven by a mixture of passive decay and top-down inhibitory control, the contribution of each component being modulated by task demands. Our results suggest that PD selectively impairs the inhibitory control component, a deficit likely remediated by DA medication. This work advances our understanding of action control deficits in PD, and illustrates the benefit of using computational models to quantitatively measure cognitive processes in clinical populations.

Lying upside-down: Alibis reverse cognitive burdens of dishonesty.

The cognitive processes underlying dishonesty, especially the inhibition of automatic honest response tendencies, are reflected in response times and other behavioral measures. Here we suggest that explicit false alibis might have a considerable impact on these cognitive operations. We tested this hypothesis in a controlled experimental setup. Participants first performed several tasks in a preexperimental mission (akin to common mock crime procedures) and received a false alibi afterward. The false alibi stated alternative actions that the participants had to pretend to have performed instead of the actually performed actions. In a computer-based inquiry, the false alibi did not only reduce, but it even reversed the typical behavioral effects of dishonesty on response initiation (Experiment1) and response execution (Experiment 2). Follow-up investigations of response activation via distractor stimuli suggest that false alibis automatize either dishonest response retrieval, the inhibition of the honest response, or both (Experiments 3 and 4). This profound impact suggests that false alibis can override actually performed activities entirely and, thus, documents a severe limitation for cognitive approaches to lie detection. (PsycINFO Database Record

MPQ Control (versus Impulsivity) and Need for Cognition – Relationship to behavioral inhibition and corresponding ERPs in a Go/No-Go task

Both, the MPQ Control (vs. Impulsivity) scale and the Need for Cognition (NFC) scale, refer to trait concepts encompassing reflective, goal-directed and controlled behavioral tendencies, with the former addressing more behavioral and the latter more cognitive aspects of control. However, research on their relationship with behavioral inhibition, especially with regard to electrophysiological aspects of inhibitory control is scarce. Therefore, in the present study, the trait scores of N=131 participants were analyzed with data from a Go/No-Go task and corresponding electrocortical measures of inhibition, the NoGo-N2 and NoGo-P3. Higher MPQ Control scores were associated with fewer false alarms, prolonged reaction times, and a delayed NoGo-N2. This suggests that MPQ Control is related to response inhibition and earlier stages of inhibition processing. There was no association between NFC and behavior, but higher scores were significantly associated with NoGo-N2 and even more strongly with NoGo-P3 latency. This suggests that NFC plays a role particularly in later stages of inhibition-related processing, but does not moderate the suppression of inappropriate and relatively automatic response tendencies in a basic response inhibition task. Future research should employ more complex tasks (e.g., impulsive choice/delay discounting tasks) to further clarify the relation of NFC to behavioral inhibition.

Testosterone during Puberty Shifts Emotional Control from Pulvinar to Anterior Prefrontal Cortex.

Increased limbic and striatal activation in adolescence has been attributed to a relative delay in the maturation of prefrontal areas, resulting in the increase of impulsive reward-seeking behaviors that are often observed during puberty. However, it remains unclear whether and how this general developmental pattern applies to the control of social emotional actions, a fundamental adult skill refined during adolescence. This domain of control pertains to decisions involving emotional responses. When faced with a social emotional challenge (e.g., an angry face), we can follow automatic response tendencies and avoid the challenge or exert control over those tendencies by selecting an alternative action. Using an fMRI-adapted social approach-avoidance task, this study identifies how the neural regulation of emotional action control changes as a function of human pubertal development in 14-year-old adolescents (n = 47). Pubertal maturation, indexed by testosterone levels, shifted neural regulation of emotional actions from the pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus and the amygdala to the anterior prefrontal cortex (aPFC). Adolescents with more advanced pubertal maturation showed greater aPFC activity when controlling their emotional action tendencies, reproducing the same pattern consistently observed in adults. In contrast, adolescents of the same age, but with less advanced pubertal maturation, showed greater pulvinar and amygdala activity when exerting similarly effective emotional control. These findings qualify how, in the domain of social emotional actions, executive control shifts from subcortical to prefrontal structures during pubertal development. The pulvinar and the amygdala are suggested as the ontogenetic precursors of the mature control system centered on the anterior prefrontal cortex. Adolescents can show distinct behavioral problems when emotionally aroused. This could be related to later development of frontal regions compared with deeper brain structures. This study found that when the control of emotional actions needs to be exerted, more mature adolescents, similar to adults, recruit the anterior prefrontal cortex (aPFC). Less mature adolescents recruit specific subcortical regions, namely the pulvinar and amygdala. These findings identify the subcortical pulvino-amygdalar pathway as a relevant precursor of a mature aPFC emotional control system, opening the way for a neurobiological understanding of how emotion control-related disorders emerge during puberty.

Trait Mindfulness Predicts Efficient Top-Down Attention to and Discrimination of Facial Expressions.

In social situations, skillful regulation of emotion and behavior depends on efficiently discerning others' emotions. Identifying factors that promote timely and accurate discernment of facial expressions can therefore advance understanding of social emotion regulation and behavior. The present research examined whether trait mindfulness predicts neural and behavioral markers of early top-down attention to, and efficient discrimination of, socioemotional stimuli. Attention-based event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral responses were recorded while participants (N = 62; White; 67% female; Mage = 19.09 years, SD = 2.14 years) completed an emotional go/no-go task involving happy, neutral, and fearful facial expressions. Mindfulness predicted larger (more negative) N100 and N200 ERP amplitudes to both go and no-go stimuli. Mindfulness also predicted faster response time that was not attributable to a speed-accuracy trade-off. Significant relations held after accounting for attentional control or social anxiety. This study adds neurophysiological support for foundational accounts that mindfulness entails moment-to-moment attention with lower tendencies toward habitual patterns of responding. Mindfulness may enhance the quality of social behavior in socioemotional contexts by promoting efficient top-down attention to and discrimination of others' emotions, alongside greater monitoring and inhibition of automatic response tendencies.

Blunted brain activation in patients with schizophrenia in response to emotional cognitive inhibition: A functional near-infrared spectroscopy study

IntroductionPatients with schizophrenia (SZ) have deficits of facial emotion processing and cognitive inhibition, but the brain pathophysiology underlying these deficits and their interaction are not clearly understood. We tested brain activity during an emotional face go/no-go task that requires rapid executive control affected by emotional stimuli in patients with SZ using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). MethodsTwenty-five patients with SZ and 28 healthy control subjects were studied. We evaluated behavioral performance and used fNIRS to measure oxygenated hemoglobin concentration changes in fronto-temporal areas during the emotional go/no-go task with emotional and non-emotional blocks. ResultsPatients with SZ made more errors and had longer reaction times in both test blocks compared with healthy subjects. Significantly greater activation in the inferior, superior, middle, and orbital frontal regions were observed in healthy subjects during the emotional go/no-go block compared to the non-emotional go/no-go block, but this difference was not observed in patients with SZ. Relative to healthy subjects, patients with SZ showed less activation in the superior and orbital frontal and middle temporal regions during the emotional go/no-go block. DiscussionOur results suggest that fronto-temporal dysfunction in patients with SZ is due to an interaction between abnormal processing of emotional facial expressions with negative valence and cognitive inhibition, especially during the rapid selection of rule-based associations that override automatic emotional response tendencies. They indicate that fronto-temporal dysfunction is involved in the pathophysiology of emotional–cognitive deficits in patients with SZ.

Stereotype Threat Strengthens Automatic Recall and Undermines Controlled Processes in Older Adults

The threat of being judged stereotypically (stereotype threat) may impair memory performance in older adults, thereby producing inflated age differences in memory tasks. However, the underlying mechanisms of stereotype threat in older adults or other stigmatized groups remain poorly understood. Here, we offer evidence that stereotype threat consumes working memory resources in older adults. More important, using a process-dissociation procedure, we found, for the first time, that stereotype threat undermines the controlled use of memory and simultaneously intensifies automatic response tendencies. These findings indicate that competing models of stereotype threat are actually compatible and offer further reasons for researchers and practitioners to pay special attention to age-related stereotypes during standardized neuropsychological testing.

Out of control: An associative account of congruency effects in sequence learning

The demonstration of a sequential congruency effect in sequence learning has been offered as evidence for control processes that act to inhibit automatic response tendencies (Jiménez, Lupiáñez, & Vaquero, 2009) via unconscious conflict monitoring. Here we propose an alternative interpretation of this effect based on the associative learning of chains of sequenced contingencies. This account is supported by simulations with a Simple Recurrent Network, an associative (connectionist) model of sequence learning. We argue that the control- and associative-based accounts differ in their predictions concerning the magnitude of the sequential congruency effect across training. These predictions are tested by reanalysing data from a study by Shanks, Wilkinson, and Channon (2003). The results support the associative learning account which explains the sequential congruency effect without appealing to control processes (either conscious or unconscious).

Implicit processes in pathological skin picking: Responses to skin irregularities predict symptom severity and treatment susceptibility

Background and objectives Implicit cognitive processes are relevant in understanding the development and maintenance of psychopathology and dysfunctional behaviours. The present study investigated the role of implicit processes in pathological skin picking (PSP). Methods Using an Approach–Avoidance Task (AAT), we examined automatic response tendencies towards skin picking-related photographs in a sample of 34 college students who suffered from PSP and participated in a randomized, waiting-list controlled treatment study. Results In comparison to a control sample ( n = 49), PSP patients displayed significantly decelerated reaction times (distraction) in response to photographs of skin irregularities and a tendency to respond with avoidance to photographs of skin irregularities. Both distraction and avoidance in reaction to photographs of skin irregularities were significantly associated with current skin picking severity. Moreover, the strength of distraction in response to skin irregularities predicted unique variance in skin picking severity at post-measurement, over and above the effect of skin picking severity at pre-measurement and the effect of treatment condition. For the treatment condition, higher initial distraction predicted better treatment outcome (lower skin picking severity at post-measurement), whereas it predicted symptom deterioration at post-treatment for untreated participants. Limitations The specific characteristics of PSP patients (mainly female university students) and the relatively small sample size may compromise generalizability of findings. Conclusions In PSP, affective distraction in response to skin irregularities seems to characterize an important process related to symptom severity as well as treatment susceptibility.

The Neural Underpinnings of How Reward Associations Can Both Guide and Misguide Attention

It is commonly accepted that reward is an effective motivator of behavior, but little is known about potential costs resulting from reward associations. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural underpinnings of such reward-related performance-disrupting effects in a reward-modulated Stroop task in humans. While reward associations in the task-relevant dimension (i.e., ink color) facilitated performance, behavioral detriments were found when the task-irrelevant dimension (i.e., word meaning) implicitly referred to reward-predictive ink colors. Neurally, only relevant reward associations invoked a typical reward-anticipation response in the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), which was in turn predictive of behavioral facilitation. In contrast, irrelevant reward associations increased activity in a medial prefrontal motor-control-related region, namely the presupplementary motor area (pre-SMA), which likely reflects the preemption and inhibition of automatic response tendencies that are amplified by irrelevant reward-related words. This view was further supported by a positive relationship between pre-SMA activity and pronounced response slowing in trials containing reward-related as compared with reward-unrelated incongruent words. Importantly, the distinct neural processes related to the beneficial and detrimental behavioral effects of reward associations appeared to arise from preferential-coding mechanisms in visual-processing areas that were shared by the two stimulus dimensions, suggesting a transfer of reward-related saliency to the irrelevant dimension, but with highly differential behavioral and neural ramifications. More generally, the data demonstrate that even entirely irrelevant reward associations can influence stimulus-processing and response-selection pathways relatively automatically, thereby representing an important flipside of reward-driven performance enhancements.

Sequential congruency effects in implicit sequence learning

We deal with situations incongruent with our automatic response tendencies much better right after having done so on a previous trial than after having reacted to a congruent trial. The nature of the mechanisms responsible for these sequential congruency effects is currently a hot topic of debate. According to the conflict monitoring model these effects depend on the adjustment of control triggered by the detection of conflict on the preceding situation. We tested whether these conflict monitoring processes can operate implicitly in an implicit learning procedure, modulating the expression of knowledge of which participants are not aware. We reanalyze recently published data, and present an experiment with a probabilistic sequence learning procedure, both showing consistent effects of implicit sequence learning. Despite being implicit, the expression of learning was reduced or completely eliminated right after trials incongruent with the learned sequence, thus showing that sequential congruency effects can be obtained even when the source of congruency itself remains implicit.

Deficient Activity in the Neural Systems That Mediate Self-regulatory Control in Bulimia Nervosa

Disturbances in neural systems that mediate voluntary self-regulatory processes may contribute to bulimia nervosa (BN) by releasing feeding behaviors from regulatory control. To study the functional activity in neural circuits that subserve self-regulatory control in women with BN. We compared functional magnetic resonance imaging blood oxygenation level-dependent responses in patients with BN with healthy controls during performance of the Simon Spatial Incompatibility task. University research institute. Forty women: 20 patients with BN and 20 healthy control participants. Main Outcome Measure We used general linear modeling of Simon Spatial Incompatibility task-related activations to compare groups on their patterns of brain activation associated with the successful or unsuccessful engagement of self-regulatory control. Patients with BN responded more impulsively and made more errors on the task than did healthy controls; patients with the most severe symptoms made the most errors. During correct responding on incongruent trials, patients failed to activate frontostriatal circuits to the same degree as healthy controls in the left inferolateral prefrontal cortex (Brodmann area [BA] 45), bilateral inferior frontal gyrus (BA 44), lenticular and caudate nuclei, and anterior cingulate cortex (BA 24/32). Patients activated the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (BA 32) more when making errors than when responding correctly. In contrast, healthy participants activated the anterior cingulate cortex more during correct than incorrect responses, and they activated the striatum more when responding incorrectly, likely reflecting an automatic response tendency that, in the absence of concomitant anterior cingulate cortex activity, produced incorrect responses. Self-regulatory processes are impaired in women with BN, likely because of their failure to engage frontostriatal circuits appropriately. These findings enhance our understanding of the pathogenesis of BN by pointing to functional abnormalities within a neural system that subserves self-regulatory control, which may contribute to binge eating and other impulsive behaviors in women with BN.

The self-regulation of automatic associations and behavioral impulses.

The distinction between automatic processes and controlled processes is a central organizational theme across areas of psychology. However, this dichotomy conceals important differences among qualitatively different processes that independently contribute to ongoing behavior. The Quadruple process model is a multinomial model that provides quantitative estimates of 4 distinct processes in a single task: the likelihood that an automatic response tendency is activated; the likelihood that a contextually appropriate response can be determined; the likelihood that automatic response tendencies are overcome when necessary; and the likelihood that in the absence of other information, behavior is driven by a general response bias. The model integrates dual-process models from many domains of inquiry and offers a generalized, more nuanced framework of impulse regulation across these domains. The model offers insights into many central questions surrounding the operation and the interaction of automatic and controlled processes. Applications of the model to empirical and theoretical concerns in a variety of areas of psychology are discussed.

Movement planning deficits in schizophrenia: Failure to inhibit automatic response tendencies

Introduction. Explicit planning deficits have been reported frequently in patients with schizophrenia. This study addressed the question whether these patients would already encounter difficulties in a more “implicit” process of planning an optimal sequence of movements in simple actions. Methods. Twenty patients with schizophrenia and 20 controls participated in the study. The motor tasks consisted of copying simple line drawings in which the planning of a movement sequence was taxed along various dimensions. In the first task the number of line elements varied between one and two, and the two-line figures differed with respect to the ease with which the so-called graphic production rules could be applied. In the second task the spatial position of the drawing varied between an easy centre position and a somewhat more difficult corner location. In the third task, subjects were asked to start copying either at a preferred or at a less preferred starting point. Results. The results showed that the patients did not encounter planning difficulties while copying the one- or two-segment patterns. However, the variations in the spatial conditions and starting point did affect the patients' performance more than that of the controls. Whereas the patients with higher negative symptom scores tended to be slower when they were forced to start drawing at a particular point, the patients predominantly exhibiting features of disorganisation proved to be faster in this condition. Conclusions. The findings suggest a fairly intact initiation of simple movement sequences in patients with schizophrenia, but difficulties in inhibiting automatic response tendencies. It is concluded that this inhibition failure may play an important role in the planning difficulties these patients experience.