Reactive and Proactive Adaptation of Cognitive and Motor Neural Signals during Performance of a Stop-Change Task

Brockett, Adam T.; Roesch, Matthew R. · 2021 · Crossref

DOI: 10.3390/brainsci11050617

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Summary

This review examines the neural mechanisms underlying inhibitory control, specifically focusing on how the brain adapts cognitively and motorically during the performance of a stop-change task. The authors address the problem of understanding how executive function systems prevent inappropriate actions and adapt behavioral strategies to minimize future failures. While inhibitory control is traditionally attributed to frontal brain areas, evidence suggests a broader network involving temporal and midbrain structures contributes to this process. The review synthesizes literature from human and rodent studies, with a particular emphasis on recent electrophysiological work in rodents, to explain how the brain detects conflict between competing motor plans and biases action selection through both reactive and proactive mechanisms. The authors utilize the stop-signal task as a primary framework for comparison due to its adaptability across species and its ability to isolate inhibitory control processes. Unlike tasks such as the Stroop test, which rely on human-specific skills like reading, the stop-signal task uses visual or auditory cues, allowing for direct cross-species comparison and controlled physiological disruption studies. The review details a specific variant called the stop-change task, where subjects must inhibit an initial reflexive response to a GO cue and redirect their action based on a subsequent STOP cue. This design allows researchers to distinguish between successful inhibitory control and inattentiveness. The analysis focuses on neural activity in key regions including the dorsomedial striatum (DMS), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), amygdala, and ventral tegmental area (VTA). Key findings highlight the DMS's role in representing dueling action plans. Electrophysiological recordings in rats revealed that DMS neurons exhibit strong directional preferences, initially encoding the reflexive GO response. On successful STOP trials, this initial encoding is rapidly overwritten by a second wave of firing that signals the correct redirected direction before the behavioral response is executed. This adaptive shift correlates with slower, more deliberative movement times and higher accuracy. Conversely, on error trials, firing favors the incorrect direction, mirroring GO trial patterns and correlating with faster, ballistic movements. The review also discusses the ACC’s function in conflict detection and motivational biasing, noting that it integrates value-based information to influence decisions between competing outputs. The authors emphasize that proactive mechanisms, which prepare the system for potential conflict, and reactive mechanisms, which respond to immediate errors, both facilitate successful inhibitory control. The significance of this work lies in providing a unified framework for understanding inhibitory control across brain regions and species. By focusing on the stop-signal task, the authors demonstrate that inhibitory control is not solely a frontal lobe function but involves a distributed network where the DMS represents competing actions and frontal and midbrain structures bias the selection of the appropriate motor plan. This perspective aids in characterizing the neural basis of executive function and offers insights into how disruptions in these circuits may contribute to neuropsychiatric conditions characterized by impaired inhibitory control. The review underscores the importance of considering both the detection of conflict and the subsequent modulation of motor plans in future theories and experiments.

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• executive function