Interactions between cognition and motivation during response inhibition

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.10.017

Neuropsychologia

Volume 48, Issue 2, January 2010, Pages 558-565

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.10.017 Get rights and content

Abstract

A growing number of studies have investigated how motivation interacts with particular cognitive functions, including attention, working memory, and other executive functions. In these studies, the emphasis has been on understanding how motivation impacts brain regions that contribute to improving behavioral performance. Less is understood about how positive incentives may actually impair behavioral performance. Here, we were interested in investigating a situation in which reward would be potentially deleterious to behavioral performance. Specifically, we hypothesized that rewarding participants for correct going would impair stopping performance. Critically, we hypothesized that the effects on inhibition would be specific, namely, not simply attributable to a speeding-up of reaction time during go trials. To investigate the interaction between inhibition and motivation, participants performed a stop-signal task during two conditions, namely, during a neutral, control condition and during a rewarded condition during which they were rewarded for correct go performance. Behaviorally, participants exhibited longer stop-signal reaction times during the reward relative to the control condition, indicating that it was harder to inhibit their responses during the former condition. Neuroimaging findings revealed that a host of brain regions were involved in stop-signal inhibition, as indexed via the contrast of successful and unsuccessful stop trials. Critically, a subset of these regions, which included the right inferior frontal gyrus, the left precentral gyrus, and bilateral putamen, exhibited significant inhibition by condition interactions, demonstrating that cognitive and motivational signals interact in the brain during inhibitory control.

Section snippets

Subjects

Thirty-five volunteers (22 ± 3 years old; 19 females) participated in the study, which was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Indiana University, Bloomington. Subjects were recruited based on responses to flyers posted on different message boards at the Bloomington campus. All subjects were in good health with no past history of psychiatric or neurological disease as assessed by a brief neuropsychiatric interview (MINI) (Sheehan et al., 1998). All participants had normal or

Behavioral results

Behavioral results are summarized in Table 1. A small improvement in behavioral accuracy was observed for go performance. Go error rate was 2.3% during the control condition and 1.5% during the reward condition (p < .01; Wilcoxon signed rank test). However, no significant differences were observed in the case of reaction time (control: 487.1 ms; reward: 484.0 ms; t(33) = .71, p = .48). As expected, because of the staircasing procedure, stop performance was approximately 50% correct during both

Discussion

In this paper, we investigated the interaction between inhibition and motivation. To do so, participants performed a stop-signal task during two conditions, namely, during a neutral, control condition and during a motivated condition during which they were rewarded for correct go performance. Behaviorally, participants exhibited longer SSRTs during the reward relative to the control condition, indicating that it was harder to inhibit their responses during the former condition. Our neuroimaging

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback and Andrew Bauer for assistance with figures. Support for this work was provided in part by the National Institute of Mental Health (R01 MH071589) and the Indiana METACyt Initiative of Indiana University, funded in part through a major grant from the Lilly Endowment Inc.

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Interactions between cognition and motivation during response inhibition

Abstract

Section snippets

Subjects

Behavioral results

Discussion

Acknowledgements

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Neuroscience and Biobehavoral Reviews

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Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and behavioral inhibition: A meta-analytic review of the stop-signal paradigm

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