Jonides J, Smith E E, Marshuetz C, Koeppe R A, Reuter-Lorenz P A
Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1998 Jul 7;95(14):8410-3. doi: 10.1073/pnas.95.14.8410.
There are many occasions in which humans and other animals must inhibit the production of some behavior or inhibit the processing of some internal representation. Success in inhibitory processing under normal circumstances can be revealed by the fact that certain brain pathologies render inhibitory processing ineffective. These pathologies often have been associated with damage to frontal cortex, including lateral and inferior aspects. We provide behavioral evidence of a verbal working memory task that, by hypothesis, engaged inhibitory processing, and we show (by using positron emission tomograpny) that the inhibitory processing is associated with a lateral portion of the left prefrontal cortex. The task in which subjects engaged was item-recognition: Four target letters were presented for storage followed, after a brief interval, by a probe letter that could match a target letter or not. On some trials, when the probe did not match a target letter and therefore required a "no" response, the probe had matched a target letter of the previous trial, so on these trials a "yes" response was prepotent and had to be inhibited, by hypothesis. Compared with a condition in which no prepotent response was created, this condition yielded brain activation in left inferior frontal gyrus, in the region of Brodmann's area 45.
在许多情况下，人类和其他动物必须抑制某些行为的产生或抑制某些内部表征的处理。在正常情况下，抑制性处理的成功可以通过某些脑部病变使抑制性处理失效这一事实来揭示。这些病变通常与额叶皮质受损有关，包括外侧和下部。我们提供了一项言语工作记忆任务的行为证据，根据假设，该任务涉及抑制性处理，并且我们表明（通过使用正电子发射断层扫描）抑制性处理与左前额叶皮质的外侧部分有关。受试者参与的任务是项目识别：呈现四个目标字母以供存储，经过短暂间隔后，再呈现一个探测字母，该探测字母可能与目标字母匹配，也可能不匹配。在某些试验中，当探测字母与目标字母不匹配因此需要做出“否”反应时，该探测字母与前一次试验的目标字母匹配，所以在这些试验中，“是”反应占优势，根据假设必须被抑制。与没有产生优势反应的情况相比，这种情况在左额下回、布罗德曼45区区域产生了大脑激活。
