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Inhibitory control of reaching movements in humans

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An Erratum to this article was published on 14 February 2009

Abstract

Behavioral flexibility provides a very large repertoire of actions and strategies, however, it carries a cost: a potential interference between different options. The voluntary control of behavior starts exactly with the ability of deciding between alternatives. Certainly inhibition plays a key role in this process. Here we examined the inhibitory control of reaching arm movements with the countermanding paradigm. Right-handed human subjects were asked to perform speeded reaching movements toward a visual target appearing either on the same or opposite side of the reaching arm (no-stop trials), but to withhold the commanded movement whenever an infrequent stop signal was presented (stop trials). As the delay between go and stop signals increased, subjects increasingly failed to inhibit the movement. From this inhibitory function and the reaction times of movements in no-stop trials, we estimated the otherwise unobservable duration of the stopping process, the stop signal reaction time (SSRT). We found that the SSRT for reaching movements was, on average, 206 ms and that it varied with the reaching arm and the target position even though the stop signal was a central stimulus. In fact, subjects were always faster to withhold reaching movements toward visual targets appearing on the same side of the reaching arm. This behavior strictly parallels the course of the reaction times of no-stop trials. These data show that the stop and go processes interacting in this countermanding task are independent, but most likely influenced by a common factor when under the control of the same hemisphere. In addition, we show that the point beyond which the response cannot be inhibited, the so-called point-of-no-return that divides controlled and ballistic phases of movement processing, lies after the inter-hemispheric transfer.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the grant C26G031031 from the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’ and partially by the grant 530/F4/1 from the Italian National Institute of Health and by the grant 2005051741 from the MIUR. M. Paré is a EBJL Foundation Research Scholar and he holds a New Investigator Award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. He was a Visiting Professor (fall 2004) at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’. We would like to acknowledge the contribution of Trina Norden-Krichmar for invaluable advice concerning the Cortex set-up.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Human Physiology and Pharmacology, University ‘La Sapienza’, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185, Rome, Italy

    Giovanni Mirabella, Pierpaolo Pani, Martin Paré & Stefano Ferraina

  2. Dottorato di Ricerca in Neurofisiologia, University ‘La Sapienza’, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185, Rome, Italy

    Pierpaolo Pani

  3. Department of Physiology, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada, K7L 3N6

    Martin Paré

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  1. Giovanni Mirabella
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  2. Pierpaolo Pani
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  4. Stefano Ferraina
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Correspondence to Stefano Ferraina.

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An erratum to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00221-009-1727-3.

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Mirabella, G., Pani, P., Paré, M. et al. Inhibitory control of reaching movements in humans. Exp Brain Res 174, 240–255 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-006-0456-0

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