Elsevier

NeuroImage

Volume 47, Issue 2, 15 August 2009, Pages 705-712
NeuroImage

Inhibitory spillover: Intentional motor inhibition produces incidental limbic inhibition via right inferior frontal cortex

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2009.04.084Get rights and content

Abstract

Neurocognitive studies have observed rIFC involvement in motor, cognitive, and affective inhibition, suggesting that rIFC is a common inhibitory mechanism across psychological domains. If true, intentional inhibition in one domain may have unintended inhibitory effects (“spillover”) in other domains. The present study used an emotional go/no-go task that produces responses in both motor and affective domains, but induces intentional inhibition in only the motor domain. Data support the hypothesis that intentional inhibition in the motor domain, via rIFC, produces inhibitory spillover in the affective domain. Specifically, we observed increased rIFC along with reduced amygdala activity when participants intentionally inhibited motor responses during the presentation of negatively-valenced stimuli, and greater inverse connectivity between these regions during motor inhibition in a PPI analysis. Given the absence of intentional affect regulation, these results suggest that intentional inhibition of a motor response dampens the amygdala activation coincident with affective stimuli to the extent that rIFC activation is higher.

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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