Hervault Mario, Wessel Jan R
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242
Department of Neurology, University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, Iowa City, Iowa 52242.
J Neurosci. 2025 Mar 26;45(13):e1537242025. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1537-24.2025.
Inhibitory control is a crucial cognitive-control ability for behavioral flexibility, which has been extensively investigated through action-stopping tasks. Multiple neurophysiological features have been proposed as "signatures" of inhibitory control during action-stopping, though the processes indexed by these signatures are still controversially discussed. The present study aimed to disentangle these processes by comparing simple stopping situations with those in which additional action revisions were needed. Three experiments in female and male humans were performed to characterize the neurophysiological dynamics involved in action-stopping and action-changing, with hypotheses derived from recently developed two-stage "pause-then-cancel" models of inhibitory control. Both stopping and revising an action triggered an early, broad "pause"-process, marked by frontal EEG β-frequency bursting and nonselective suppression of corticospinal excitability. However, EMG showed that motor activity was only partially inhibited by this "pause" and that this activity could be modulated during action revision. In line with two-stage models of inhibitory control, subsequent frontocentral EEG activity after this initial "pause" selectively scaled depending on the required action revisions, with more activity observed for more complex revisions. This demonstrates the presence of a selective, effector-specific "retune" phase as the second process involved in action-stopping and action revision. Together, these findings show that inhibitory control is implemented over an extended period of time and in at least two phases. We are further able to align the most commonly proposed neurophysiological signatures to these phases and show that they are differentially modulated by the complexity of action revision.
抑制控制是行为灵活性的一项关键认知控制能力，人们已通过动作停止任务对其进行了广泛研究。在动作停止过程中，多种神经生理特征已被提出作为抑制控制的“标志”，尽管这些标志所索引的过程仍存在争议。本研究旨在通过比较简单的停止情况与需要额外动作修正的情况来厘清这些过程。对男性和女性进行了三项实验，以表征动作停止和动作改变所涉及的神经生理动态，其假设源自最近发展的抑制控制两阶段“暂停然后取消”模型。停止和修正动作均引发了一个早期、广泛的“暂停”过程，其特征为额叶脑电图β频率爆发以及皮质脊髓兴奋性的非选择性抑制。然而，肌电图显示，这种“暂停”仅部分抑制了运动活动，并且该活动在动作修正过程中可以被调节。与抑制控制的两阶段模型一致，在这个初始“暂停”之后，随后的额中央脑电图活动根据所需的动作修正进行选择性缩放，更复杂的修正会观察到更多活动。这表明存在一个选择性的、效应器特异性的“重新调整”阶段，作为动作停止和动作修正所涉及的第二个过程。总之，这些发现表明抑制控制是在一段较长时间内且至少分两个阶段实施的。我们还能够将最常提出的神经生理标志与这些阶段进行匹配，并表明它们受到动作修正复杂性的不同调节。
