Preparing to React: A Behavioral Study on the Interplay between Proactive and Reactive Action Inhibition.

Motor preparation, based on one's goals and expectations, allows for prompt reactions to stimulations from the environment. Proactive and reactive inhibitory mechanisms modulate this preparation and interact to allow a flexible control of responses. In this study, we investigate these two control mechanisms with an cued Go/NoGo Simon paradigm in a within-subjects design, and by measuring subliminal motor activities through electromyographic recordings.

Becoming aware of subliminal responses: An EEG/EMG study on partial error detection and correction in humans.

In experimental settings, most overt behavioral errors are consciously perceived. They are, however, only the tip of the iceberg, and electromyographic recording of the muscles involved in the response reveals subthreshold incorrect response activations. Although they are all efficiently corrected, such "partial errors" are poorly consciously detected.

Motor Preparation for Action Inhibition: A Review of Single Pulse TMS Studies Using the Go/NoGo Paradigm.

Human behavior must be flexible to respond to environmental and social demands, and to achieve these goals, it requires control. For instance, inhibitory control is used to refrain from executing unwanted or anticipated responses to environmental stimuli. When inhibitory mechanisms are inefficient due to some pathological conditions, such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or pathological gambling, patients show a reduced capability of refraining from executing actions.

Proactive Inhibition Activation Depends on Motor Preparation: A Single Pulse TMS Study.

In everyday life, environmental cues are used to predict and respond faster to upcoming events. Similarly, in cueing paradigms (where, on cued trials, a cued target requires a speeded response), cues are known to speed up response times (RTs), suggesting that motor preparation has occurred. However, some studies using short cue-target intervals (<300 ms) have found slower RTs on cued, compared to uncued trials (namely, the "paradoxical warning cost").

The critical role of the dorsal fronto-median cortex in voluntary action inhibition: A TMS study.

Background: Action inhibition is a complex decision process that can be triggered by external factors (exogenous) or internal decisions (endogenous). While the neuronal underpinnings of exogenous action inhibition have been extensively investigated, less is known about the brain areas responsible for endogenous action inhibition.

Objective: We used inhibitory repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to test the causal role of two brain areas, the left dorsal fronto-median Cortex (dFMC) and the right Inferior Frontal Cortex (rIFC) in exogenous and endogenous action inhibition.

Transcranial random-noise stimulation of visual cortex potentiates value-driven attentional capture.

Reward feedback following visual search causes the visual characteristics of targets to become salient and attention-drawing, but little is known about the mechanisms underlying this value-driven capture effect. Here, we use transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS) to demonstrate that such reward potentiation involves induced plasticity in visual cortex. Human participants completed a feature-search reward-learning task involving the selection of a red or green colored target presented among distractors of various color.