Inhibitory spillover: Intentional motor inhibition produces incidental limbic inhibition via right inferior frontal cortex
Section snippets
Subjects
Fourteen right-handed participants (6 male; ages 21–35, M = 25.6 ± 3.8) were recruited from the UCLA community and paid $25 for participating. Data from one male and one female were excluded due to excessive head motion during scanning, yielding twelve participants in the analyses. All participants provided written informed consent that was approved by the UCLA Office for Protection of Research Subjects.
Stimuli
The images presented during the go/no-go task were photographs drawn from the NimStim face set (
Behavioral results of motor inhibition
Participants were able to successfully inhibit motor responses on 98.4% of the no-go trials. Neither the average error rate on the no-go trials nor the average response time on the go trials was different between positively- and negatively-valenced faces (paired t13 = 1.24 and 0.84, respectively, both ns). The inaccurate trials were discarded for all further analyses.
Neural activations during motor inhibition
Replicating findings from previous motor inhibition studies (Menon et al., 2001), no-go trials (as compared to go trials) activated
Discussion
Neurocognitive studies have consistently observed rIFC involvement in inhibition across a number of domains (e.g. motor, cognitive, affective), which raises the possibility that rIFC might act as a common inhibitory region across each of those domains. If rIFC has inhibitory outputs that impact each domain, then intentional inhibition in one domain should produce inhibitory spillover into other domains to the extent that rIFC is activated and responses in other domains are available to be
Acknowledgments
Portions of this research were presented at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society held in San Francisco, CA, in April 2008.
This research was supported by NIH grants MH071521 to MDL and Neuroimaging Training Grant T90DA022768 to ETB.
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