Cognitive and Behavioural Neuroscience Laboratory, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, Maharashtra, 400076, India.
Sci Rep. 2022 Oct 10;12(1):16962. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-19116-5.
Response inhibition is a crucial component of executive control, which refers to our ability to suppress responses that are no longer needed or inappropriate. The stop-signal task is a standard tool to assess inhibitory control over actions. Here, we use irrelevant facial expressions (happy, angry, or neutral) as both go and stop-signal to examine competition for shared attentional resources between (a) emotion and inhibition process and (b) go and stop processes. Participants were required to respond to go signals (gender discrimination task: male or female). Occasionally, a stop-signal (face with irrelevant angry, happy, or neutral facial expression) was presented, and participants were required to withhold their motor response. We found that emotion processing (especially angry faces) captures attention away from the task, and the emotionality of the stop signal matters only when the go signal is non-emotional. When the go signal was non-emotional, we found that stop-signal with irrelevant angry facial expressions impaired inhibitory control compared to stop-signal with irrelevant happy and neutral facial expressions. These results indicate that the processing of emotion and inhibition process exploit a shared pool of attentional resources. These results favor an interactive capacity-sharing account of the go and stop processes in models of response inhibition.
反应抑制是执行控制的一个关键组成部分，它指的是我们抑制不再需要或不适当的反应的能力。停止信号任务是评估动作抑制控制的标准工具。在这里，我们使用不相关的面部表情（快乐、愤怒或中性）作为去和停止信号，以检查（a）情绪和抑制过程之间，以及（b）去和停止过程之间对共享注意力资源的竞争。参与者需要对去信号（性别歧视任务：男性或女性）做出反应。偶尔会出现停止信号（带有不相关的愤怒、快乐或中性面部表情的面孔），参与者需要抑制他们的运动反应。我们发现，情绪处理（尤其是愤怒的面孔）会将注意力从任务中转移开，并且只有在去信号是非情绪的情况下，停止信号的情绪性才很重要。当去信号是非情绪的时，我们发现与不相关的快乐和中性面部表情的停止信号相比，带有不相关的愤怒面部表情的停止信号会损害抑制控制。这些结果表明，情绪处理和抑制过程利用了共享的注意力资源池。这些结果支持了在反应抑制模型中去和停止过程的交互能力共享解释。
