How to withhold or replace a prepotent response: An analysis of the underlying control processes and their temporal dynamics☆
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
References (107)
- et al.
Inhibitory motor control in stop paradigms: Review and reinterpretation of neural mechanisms
Acta Psychologica
(1999) - et al.
Electrophysiological correlates of attention, inhibition, sensitivity and bias in a continuous performance task
Clinical Neurophysiology
(2004) - et al.
The pure electrophysiology of stopping
International Journal of Psychophysiology
(2005) - et al.
Stop or stop-change − Does it make any difference for the inhibition process?
International Journal of Psychophysiology
(2013) - et al.
Conflict monitoring and anterior cingulate cortex: An update
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
(2004) - et al.
Response priming in a go/nogo task: Do we have to explain the go/nogo N2 effect in terms of response activation instead of inhibition?
Clinical Neurophysiology
(2001) - et al.
Distribution of slow brain potentials related to motor preparation and stimulus anticipation in a time estimation task
Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology
(1988) What is wrong with legs in motor preparation?
- et al.
Dynamics of saccade target selection: Race model analysis of double step and search step saccade production in human and macaque
Vision Research
(2007) - et al.
Inhibitory motor control in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: Event-related potentials in the stop-signal paradigm
Biological Psychiatry
(2003)
On the speed of mental processes
Acta Psychologica
The N2 in go/no-go tasks reflects conflict monitoring not response inhibition
Brain and Cognition
Effects of attention and stimulus probability on ERPs in a Go/Nogo task
Biological Psychology
The N2 pc component as an indicator of attentional selectivity
Electroencephalograpy and Clinical Neurophysiology
Proactive inhibitory control: A general biasing account
Cognitive Psychology
Visual P2 component is related to theta phase-locking
Neuroscience Letters
Orienting of attention with eye and arrow cues and the effect of overtraining
Acta Psychologica
Electroencephalography of response inhibition tasks: Functional networks and cognitive contributions
International Journal of Psychophysiology
Luminance and spatial attention effects on early visual processing
Cognitive Brain Research
Neural correlates of stopping and self-reported impulsivity
Clinical Neurophysiology
ERPs dissociate the effects of switching task sets and task cues
Brain Research
Methylphenidate restores link between stop-signal sensory impact and successful stopping in adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder
Biological Psychiatry
ERPs to response production and inhibition
Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology
Updating P300: An integrative theory of p3a and p3b
Clinical Neurophysiology: Official Journal of the International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology
Effects of stop signal probability in the stop-signal paradigm: The N2/P3 complex further validated
Brain and Cognition
Conflict and inhibition in the cued-Go/NoGo task
Clinical Neurophysiology
How to stop or change a motor response: Laplacian and independent component analysis approach
International Journal of Psychophysiology
Electrophysiological evidence for the involvement of proactive and reactive control in a rewarded stop-signal task
Neuroimage
Response inhibition of children with ADHD in the stop-signal task: An event-related potential study
International Journal of Psychophysiology
The scalp topography of potentials in auditory and visual Go/NoGo tasks
Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology
Effects of pre-stimulus processing on subsequent events in a warned Go/NoGo paradigm: Response preparation, execution and inhibition
International Journal of Psychophysiology
Sequence effects support the conflict theory of N2 and P3 in the Go/NoGo task
International Journal of Psychophysiology
Are the neural correlates of stopping and not going identical? Quantitative meta-analysis of two response inhibition tasks
Neuroimage
Response inhibition in the stop-signal paradigm
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Models of response inhibition in the stop-signal and stop-change paradigms
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
Evidence for capacity sharing when stopping
Cognition
Speed-accuracy modulation in case of conflict: The roles of activation and inhibition
Psychological Research
Disentangling deficits in adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder
Archives of General Psychiatry
An information-maximisation approach to blind separation and blind deconvolution
Neural Computation
When response inhibition is followed by response reengagement: An event-related fMRI study
Human Brain Mapping
Sensory MEG responses predict successful and failed inhibition in a stop-signal task
Cerebral Cortex
Inhibitory control in mind and brain: An interactive race model of countermanding saccades
Psychological Review
The psychophysics toolbox
Spatial Vision
The time taken up by cerebral operations
Mind
Strategies and mechanisms in nonselective and selective inhibitory motor control
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance
Voluntary finger movement in man: Cerebral potentials and theory
Biological Cybernetics
Bayesian versus orthodox statistics: Which side are you on?
Perspectives in Psychological Science
The neuropsychopharmacology of action inhibition: Cross-species translation of the stop-signal and go/no-go tasks
Psychopharmacology
Influence of cognitive control and mismatch on the N2 component of the ERP: A review
Psychophysiology
Cited by (9)
Reward anticipation changes corticospinal excitability during task preparation depending on response requirements and time pressure
2019, CortexCitation Excerpt :First, the duration of the target presentation (and therefore the target response deadline) was determined by an adaptive tracking procedure (3-down/1-up) that allowed for the continuous adjustment of the response deadline. Specifically (and irrespective of the reward condition), on preparation trials, the adaptive tracking procedure subtracted 25 msec from the response deadline when the participant was able to provide three correct responses within the allowed time in a row, and added 25 msec to the response deadline when the participant made an erroneous or late response (c.f., Elchlepp & Verbruggen, 2017; Leiva et al., 2015). Table 2 shows the average MEP size and the absolute number of trials that were included in the CS excitability analysis for each experimental condition for Exp.