Elsevier

Biological Psychology

Volume 123, February 2017, Pages 250-268
Biological Psychology

How to withhold or replace a prepotent response: An analysis of the underlying control processes and their temporal dynamics

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2016.10.005Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Clear neuropsysiological evidence that the same processes are involved when withholding and withholding and changing a response.

  • Early perceptual processing of the signal can be important for inhibitory control and successful change performance.

  • Introducing a new hybrid paradigm, which greatly reduces the need for correction of signal related activity from overlapping activity of the preceding go stimulus.

Abstract

The present study isolated and compared ERP components associated with flexible behavior in two action-control tasks. The ‘withhold’ groups had to withhold all responses when a signal appeared. The ‘change’ groups had to replace a prepotent go response with a different response on signal trials. We proposed that the same chain of processes determined the effectiveness of action control in both tasks. Consistent with this idea, lateral (Experiment 1) and central (Experiment 2) signal presentation elicited the same perceptual and response-related components in both tasks with similar latencies. Thus, completely withholding a response and replacing a response required a similar chain of processes. Furthermore, latency analyses revealed intra-individual differences: When the signal occurred in the periphery, differences between fast and slow change trials arose at early perceptual stages; by contrast, differences arose at later processing stages when signal detection was easy but stimulus discrimination and response selection were harder.

Section snippets

The stop-signal and go/nogo paradigm

In the standard version of the stop-signal paradigm, subjects are instructed to respond to a go stimulus (e.g. press left for a left arrow and right for a right arrow), unless a stop signal appears after a variable delay. In the standard version of the go/nogo paradigm, subjects are instructed to respond when a go signal (e.g. ‘O’) appears, but to withhold their response when a nogo signal (e.g. ‘X’) appears. In the cued variant of the go/nogo task (Band, Ridderinkhof, & van der Molen, 2003;

Withholding vs. replacing a response

In daily life, people often have to replace the stopped or cancelled actions with a new action. To study this form of action control, variants of the stop-signal and go/nogo paradigm have been developed. In the stop-change paradigm (Logan and Burkell, 1986, Verbruggen and Logan, 2009), subjects are instructed to stop their initially planned response in the primary task (hereafter referred to as the go1 response) when a stop-change signal is presented, and replace it with a new response

The present study

The stop-signal task puts higher demands on motor inhibition than most variants of the go/nogo task. However, a methodological challenge of combining the stop-signal task with ERPs is the short succession of the go stimulus and the signal, which leads to an overlap of neural activity associated with the two stimuli (see Bekker, Kenemans, Hoeksma, Talsma, & Verbaten, 2005, for a discussion), complicating the interpretation of ERP modulations. Several procedures (which are discussed in more

Experiment 1

In our tasks, on each trial a digit (the go1 stimulus) was presented in the center of the screen and was flanked by two letters (M’s or W’s). Subjects were instructed to classify the digit as lower or higher than 5 and prepare their response in a preparation interval. They were told they could only respond when a go cue was on the screen. Once the go cue disappeared, they could no longer respond. This response window was adjusted with a tracking procedure, pushing subjects to fully prepare

Subjects

Forty right-handed adults (20 in the change condition, 13 females; 20 in the withhold condition, 12 females) with an average age of 20 (ranging from 18 to 22) received two course credits or were paid £10 for their participation in this study. No subjects were excluded or replaced. Subjects did not differ significantly between the change and withhold groups in age (p = 0.3) or gender (p = 0.8). All present experiments were approved by the local research ethics committee at the School of Psychology,

Results

All raw and processed behavioral and EEG data are deposited in the Open Research Exeter data repository http://hdl.handle.net/10871/24094.

Subjects

Forty right-handed adults (20 in the change condition, 14 female; 20 in the withhold condition, 18 female) with an average age of 20 (ranging from 18 to 30) received 1.5 course credits or were paid £10 for their participation in this study. Subjects did not differ significantly between the change and withhold groups in age (p = 0.7) or gender (p = 0.12).

Apparatus, stimuli, procedure and analyses

These were the same as in Experiment 1, except for the following: We removed the flanking letters M and W and the trial started with the fixation

Change condition

On no-signal trials, the probability of a correct go1 response was 0.75 (sd = 3.8); the probability of an incorrect go1 response was 0.03 (sd = 0.4); the probability of a response before the onset of the go1 cue (too soon) was 0.01 (sd = 1.0); and the probability of a missed go1 response was 0.21 (sd = 0.4). Mean correct go1 RT was 338 ms (sd = 29) after the appearance of the go1 cue.

On change-signal trials, the probability of a correct go2 response was 0.75 (sd = 10). On failed change-signal trials, the

Conclusions

We isolated ERP components associated with basic cognitive processes following signals instructing subjects to withhold or replace a response. Their comparison revealed great similarities, providing neurophysiological evidence that the same basic processes are involved in cancelling and changing a response. We linked these basic processes to behavior by demonstrating their contribution to fast successful change performance. When signals were harder to detect most of the variability in change

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    This work was supported by a starting grant to FV from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC Grant Agreement No. 312445. FV is also FV is a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holder.

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