Distinct Brain Responses To Different Inhibitions In A Modified Flanker Task

Inhibition is one of the core subcomponents of executive function.It refers to mechanisms that reduce or attenuate neural,mental or behavioral activities.Such as suppressing external stimuli with competitive reactions and internal stimuli that interfere with working memory.Inhibitory control plays an indispensable role in daily.Such as delay gratification,get rid of distractions and do your job well all need inhibitory control.Previous studies divided inhibition into many taxonomies.However,it is still uncertain whether the different forms of “inhibition” are functionally related to another or reflect qualitatively different forms of inhibition.Some researchers proposed inhibitory control is overclassified,at least some overlapped cognitive processes among different inhibitions.Some studies try to distinguish different inhibition functions in behavioral experiment.In addition,it will be important to relate the existing taxonomy based on cognitive-behavioral work to the growing research in the cognitive neurosciences.In current,we tried to use two ERP experiments to clarify the different temporal dynamics among three different inhibitions in a rule-shifting flanker task that include interference control,rule inhibition,and button response inhibition condition.Experiment 1 was a cue-priming rule-shift flanker task.After the button press,there would be a feedback to inform the rule repeat or switch.In this way,we created three different inhibitions.The results showed that,compared to baseline:(1)interference control induced more negative frontal N2,reflecting the inhibitory control of the distractor;(2)rule inhibition yielded a larger posterior N1,followed by a larger frontal P3 a,reflecting proactive cognitive control function in the new stimulus-reaction set;and(3)button response inhibition yielded larger P3 b at the posterior region,reflecting the process of inhibiting the old response and reprogramming the new action.In order to keep the same onset time for all inhibition conditions,Experiment 2 was a cue-target combination rule-shift task based on the Experiment 1.The results indicated that:(1)interference control elicited larger fronto-central N2 and posterior P3,which might associate to inhibit irrelevant or invalid stimulus-response association;(2)a larger P2 was observed in the rule inhibition,possibly reflecting selective attention on the task-related features;(3)During P3,there was a negative going for the rule inhibition and button response inhibition,with longer time duration from P3 peak to keypress than other two conditions,indexing more time and cognitive resource were needed in reconfiguration of S-R set and representation,respectively.In conclusion,these results demonstrated that in a rule-shift flanker task,different inhibitions seemly have some uniform functions,such as similar inhibitory processes reflected in the frontal N2 component,but great quantity cognitive processes,such as early selective attention,middle inhibition processes,and late response preparation were distinct between different forms of inhibitions.