scholarly journals Unexpected sounds non-selectively inhibit active visual stimulus representations

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheol Soh ◽  
Jan R. Wessel
Keyword(s):  
Neural Mechanism ◽  
Stop Signal Task ◽  
Unexpected Events ◽  
Attentional Engagement ◽  
Memory Representations ◽  
Human Participants ◽  
Scalp Electroencephalogram ◽  
Motor Effects ◽  
P3 Component ◽  
Inhibitory Motor Control

AbstractThe brain’s capacity to process unexpected events is key to cognitive flexibility. The most well-known effect of unexpected events is the interruption of attentional engagement (distraction). We tested whether unexpected events interrupt attentional representations by activating a neural mechanism for inhibitory control. This mechanism is most well-characterized within the motor system. However, recent work showed that it is automatically activated by unexpected events and can explain some of their non-motor effects (e.g., on working memory representations). Here, human participants attended to lateralized flickering visual stimuli, producing steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP) in the scalp-electroencephalogram. After unexpected sounds, the SSVEP was rapidly suppressed. Using a functional localizer (stop-signal) task and independent component analysis, we then identified a fronto-central EEG source whose activity indexes inhibitory motor control. Unexpected sounds in the SSVEP task also activated this source. Using single-trial analyses, we found that sub-components of this source differentially relate to sound-related SSVEP changes: while its N2 component predicted the subsequent suppression of the attended-stimulus SSVEP, the P3 component predicted the suppression of the SSVEP to the unattended stimulus. These results shed new light on the processes underlying fronto-central control signals and have implications for phenomena such as distraction and the attentional blink.

scholarly journals Unexpected Sounds Nonselectively Inhibit Active Visual Stimulus Representations

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheol Soh ◽  
Jan R Wessel
Keyword(s):  
Neural Mechanism ◽  
Stop Signal Task ◽  
Unexpected Events ◽  
Control Signals ◽  
Attentional Engagement ◽  
Memory Representations ◽  
Human Participants ◽  
Scalp Electroencephalogram ◽  
P3 Component ◽  
Inhibitory Motor Control

Abstract The brain’s capacity to process unexpected events is key to cognitive flexibility. The most well-known effect of unexpected events is the interruption of attentional engagement (distraction). We tested whether unexpected events interrupt attentional representations by activating a neural mechanism for inhibitory control. This mechanism is most well characterized within the motor system. However, recent work showed that it is automatically activated by unexpected events and can explain some of their nonmotor effects (e.g., on working memory representations). Here, human participants attended to lateralized flickering visual stimuli, producing steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) in the scalp electroencephalogram. After unexpected sounds, the SSVEP was rapidly suppressed. Using a functional localizer (stop-signal) task and independent component analysis, we then identified a fronto-central EEG source whose activity indexes inhibitory motor control. Unexpected sounds in the SSVEP task also activated this source. Using single-trial analyses, we found that subcomponents of this source differentially relate to sound-induced SSVEP changes: While its N2 component predicted the subsequent suppression of the attended-stimulus SSVEP, the P3 component predicted the suppression of the SSVEP to the unattended stimulus. These results shed new light on the processes underlying fronto-central control signals and have implications for phenomena such as distraction and the attentional blink.

scholarly journals Reward modulates cortical representations of action

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyler J. Adkins ◽  
Taraz G. Lee
Keyword(s):  
Performance Enhancement ◽  
Motor Planning ◽  
Neural Mechanism ◽  
List Type ◽  
Behavioral Performance ◽  
Sequence Production ◽  
On Line ◽  
Elevated Activity ◽  
Improved Performance ◽  
Human Participants

AbstractPeople are capable of rapid on-line improvements in performance when they are offered a reward. The neural mechanism by which this performance enhancement occurs remains unclear. We investigated this phenomenon by offering monetary reward to human participants, contingent on successful performance in a sequence production task. We found that people performed actions more quickly and accurately when they were offered large rewards. Increasing reward magnitude was associated with elevated activity throughout the brain prior to movement. Multivariate patterns of activity in these reward-responsive regions encoded information about the upcoming action. Follow-up analyses provided evidence that action decoding in pre-SMA and other motor planning areas was improved for large reward trials and successful action decoding was associated with improved performance. These results suggest that reward may enhance performance by enhancing neural representations of action used in motor planning.HighlightsReward enhances behavioral performance.Reward enhances action decoding in motor planning areas prior to movement.Enhanced action decoding coincides with improved behavioral performance.

scholarly journals Saccade selection and inhibition: motor and attentional components

2019 ◽  
Vol 121 (4) ◽  
pp. 1368-1380 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donatas Jonikaitis ◽  
Saurabh Dhawan ◽  
Heiner Deubel
Keyword(s):  
Action Selection ◽  
Oculomotor System ◽  
Attentional Processing ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Neural Organization ◽  
Attentional System ◽  
Human Participants ◽  
The Look ◽  
Inhibitory Motor Control ◽  
Action Inhibition

Motor responses are fundamentally spatial in their function and neural organization. However, studies of inhibitory motor control, focused on global stopping of all actions, have ignored whether inhibitory control can be exercised selectively for specific actions. We used a new approach to elicit and measure motor inhibition by asking human participants to either look at (select) or avoid looking at (inhibit) a location in space. We found that instructing a location to be avoided resulted in an inhibitory bias specific to that location. When compared with the facilitatory bias observed in the Look task, it differed significantly in both its spatiotemporal dynamics and its modulation of attentional processing. While action selection was evident in oculomotor system and interacted with attentional processing, action inhibition was evident mainly in the oculomotor system. Our findings suggest that action inhibition is implemented by spatially specific mechanisms that are separate from action selection. NEW & NOTEWORTHY We show that cognitive control of saccadic responses evokes separable action selection and inhibition processes. Both action selection and inhibition are represented in the saccadic system, but only action selection interacts with the attentional system.

scholarly journals Saccade suppression exerts global effects on the motor system

2013 ◽  
Vol 110 (4) ◽  
pp. 883-890 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan R. Wessel ◽  
H. Sequoyah Reynoso ◽  
Adam R. Aron
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Motor System ◽  
Control Function ◽  
Suppressive Effect ◽  
Abrupt Onset ◽  
Attentional Focus ◽  
Stop Signal ◽  
Stop Signal Task ◽  
Temporal Precision ◽  
Motor Effects

Stopping inappropriate eye movements is a cognitive control function that allows humans to perform well in situations that demand attentional focus. The stop-signal task is an experimental model for this behavior. Participants initiate a saccade toward a target and occasionally have to try to stop the impending saccade if a stop signal occurs. Prior research using a version of this paradigm for limb movements (hand, leg) as well as for speech has shown that rapidly stopping action leads to apparently global suppression of the motor system, as indexed by the corticospinal excitability (CSE) of task-unrelated effectors in studies with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of M1. Here we measured CSE from the hand with high temporal precision while participants made saccades and while they successfully and unsuccessfully stopped these saccades in response to a stop signal. We showed that 50 ms before the estimated time at which a saccade is successfully stopped there was reduced CSE for the hand, which was task irrelevant. This shows that rapidly stopping eye movements also has global motor effects. We speculate that this arises because rapidly stopping eye movements, like skeleto-motor movements, is possibly achieved via input to the subthalamic nucleus of the basal ganglia, with a putatively broad suppressive effect on thalamocortical drive. Since recent studies suggest that this suppressive effect could also impact nonmotor representations, the present finding points to a possible mechanistic basis for some kinds of distractibility: abrupt-onset stimuli will interrupt ongoing processing by generating global motor and nonmotor effects.

scholarly journals Establishing a Right Frontal Beta Signature for Stopping Action in Scalp EEG: Implications for Testing Inhibitory Control in Other Task Contexts

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanna Wagner ◽  
Jan R. Wessel ◽  
Ayda Ghahremani ◽  
Adam R. Aron
Keyword(s):  
Frontal Cortex ◽  
Inhibitory Control ◽  
Spectral Power ◽  
Stop Signal ◽  
Stop Signal Task ◽  
Beta Band ◽  
Unexpected Events ◽  
Time Frequency ◽  
Inferior Frontal Cortex ◽  
The Right

Many studies have examined the rapid stopping of action as a proxy of human self-control. Several methods have shown that a critical focus for stopping is the right inferior frontal cortex. Moreover, electrocorticography studies have shown beta band power increases in the right inferior frontal cortex and in the BG for successful versus failed stop trials, before the time of stopping elapses, perhaps underpinning a prefrontal–BG network for inhibitory control. Here, we tested whether the same signature might be visible in scalp electroencephalography (EEG)—which would open important avenues for using this signature in studies of the recruitment and timing of prefrontal inhibitory control. We used independent component analysis and time–frequency approaches to analyze EEG from three different cohorts of healthy young volunteers (48 participants in total) performing versions of the standard stop signal task. We identified a spectral power increase in the band 13–20 Hz that occurs after the stop signal, but before the time of stopping elapses, with a right frontal topography in the EEG. This right frontal beta band increase was significantly larger for successful compared with failed stops in two of the three studies. We also tested the hypothesis that unexpected events recruit the same frontal system for stopping. Indeed, we show that the stopping-related right-lateralized frontal beta signature was also active after unexpected events (and we accordingly provide data and scripts for the method). These results validate a right frontal beta signature in the EEG as a temporally precise and functionally significant neural marker of the response inhibition process.

scholarly journals Frontal cortex tracks surprise separately for different sensory modalities but engages a common inhibitory control mechanism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan R. Wessel ◽  
David E. Huber
Keyword(s):  
Frontal Cortex ◽  
Inhibitory Control ◽  
Predictive Models ◽  
Event Related Potential ◽  
Stop Signal Task ◽  
Common Mechanism ◽  
Unexpected Events ◽  
Sensory Modalities ◽  
Ongoing Behavior ◽  
The Brain

AbstractThe brain constantly generates predictions about the environment to guide action. Unexpected events lead to surprise and can necessitate the modification of ongoing behavior. Surprise can occur for any sensory domain, but it is not clear how these separate surprise signals are integrated to affect motor output. By applying a trial-to-trial Bayesian surprise model to human electroencephalography data recorded during a cross-modal oddball task, we tested whether there are separate predictive models for different sensory modalities (visual, auditory), or whether expectations are integrated across modalities such that surprise in one modality decreases surprise for a subsequent unexpected event in the other modality. We found that while surprise was represented in a common frontal signature across sensory modalities (the fronto-central P3 event-related potential), the single-trial amplitudes of this signature more closely conformed to a model with separate surprise terms for each sensory domain. We then investigated whether surprise-related fronto-central P3 activity indexes the rapid inhibitory control of ongoing behavior after surprise, as suggested by recent theories. Confirming this prediction, the fronto-central P3 amplitude after both auditory and visual unexpected events was highly correlated with the fronto-central P3 found after stop-signals (measured in a separate stop-signal task). Moreover, surprise-related and stopping-related activity loaded onto the same component in a cross-task independent components analysis. Together, these findings suggest that medial frontal cortex maintains separate predictive models for different sensory domains, but engages a common mechanism for inhibitory control of behavior regardless of the source of surprise.Author summarySurprise is an elementary cognitive computation that the brain performs to guide behavior. We investigated how the brain tracks surprise across different senses: Do unexpected sounds make subsequent unexpected visual stimuli less surprising? Or does the brain maintain separate expectations of environmental regularities for different senses? We found that the latter is the case. However, even though surprise was separately tracked for auditory and visual events, it elicited a common signature over frontal cortex in both sensory domains. Importantly, we observed the same neural signature when actions had to be stopped after non-surprising stop-signals in a motor inhibition task. This suggests that this signature reflects a rapid interruption of ongoing behavior when our surroundings do not conform to our expectations.

scholarly journals Alcohol affects the P3 component of an adaptive stop signal task ERP

Alcohol ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 70 ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin H. Plawecki ◽  
Kyle A. Windisch ◽  
Leah Wetherill ◽  
Ann E.K. Kosobud ◽  
Mario Dzemidzic ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Stop Signal ◽  
Stop Signal Task ◽  
P3 Component

scholarly journals Fear conditioning prompts sparser representations of conditioned threat in primary visual cortex

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siyang Yin ◽  
Ke Bo ◽  
Yuelu Liu ◽  
Nina Thigpen ◽  
Andreas Keil ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Cortex ◽  
Fear Conditioning ◽  
Primary Visual Cortex ◽  
Neural Mechanism ◽  
Rate Of Change ◽  
Aversive Learning ◽  
Alpha Oscillations ◽  
Sensory Responses ◽  
Human Participants ◽  
The Right

AbstractRepeated exposure to threatening stimuli alters sensory responses. We investigated the underlying neural mechanism by recording simultaneous EEG-fMRI from human participants viewing oriented gratings during Pavlovian fear conditioning. In acquisition, one grating (the CS+) was paired with a noxious noise, the unconditioned stimulus (US). The other grating (CS-) was never paired with US. In habituation, which preceded acquisition, and in final extinction, the same two gratings were presented without the US. Using fMRI-BOLD multivoxel patterns in primary visual cortex during habituation as reference, we found that during acquisition, aversive learning selectively prompted systematic changes in multivoxel patterns evoked by the CS+. Specifically, CS+ evoked voxel patterns in V1 became sparser as aversive learning progressed, and the sparse pattern was preserved in extinction. Concomitant with the voxel pattern changes, occipital alpha oscillations were increasingly more desynchronized during CS+ (but not CS-) trials. Across acquisition trials, the rate of change in CS+-related alpha desynchronization was correlated with the rate of change in multivoxel pattern representations of the CS+. Furthermore, alpha oscillations co-varied with BOLD in the right temporal-parietal junction, but not with BOLD in the amygdala. Thus, fear conditioning prompts persistent sparsification of threat cue representations, likely mediated by attention-related mechanisms.

scholarly journals Identification of a Central Neural Circuit that Regulates Anxiety-induced Bone Loss

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fan Yang ◽  
Yunhui Liu ◽  
Shanping Chen ◽  
Zhongquan Dai ◽  
Dazhi Yang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Bone Loss ◽  
Bone Metabolism ◽  
Neural Circuit ◽  
Neural Mechanism ◽  
Neural Circuitry ◽  
Ventromedial Hypothalamus ◽  
Bed Nucleus ◽  
The Central Nervous System ◽  
Somatostatin Neurons ◽  
Human Participants

AbstractThe homeostasis of bone metabolism is finely regulated by the central nervous system and recent studies have suggested that mood disorders, such as anxiety, are closely related to bone metabolic abnormalities; however, our understanding of central neural circuits regulating bone metabolism is still largely limited. In this study, we first demonstrate that confined isolation of human participants under normal gravity resulted in decreased bone density and elevated anxiety levels. We then used an established mouse model to dissect the neural circuitry regulating anxiety-induced bone loss. Combining electrophysiological, optogenetic and chemogenetic approaches, we demonstrate that GABAergic neural circuitry in ventromedial hypothalamus (VMH) modulates anxiety-induced bone loss; importantly, the GABAergic input in VMHdm arose from a specific group of somatostatin neurons in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST), which is both indispensable for anxiety-induced bone loss and able to trigger bone loss in the absence of stressors. VGLUT2 neurons in Nucleus tractus solitaries (NTS) and peripheral sympathetic system were employed by this BNST-VMH neural circuit to regulate anxiety-induced bone loss. Overall, we uncovered new GABAergic neural circuitry from the forebrain to hypothalamus, used in the regulation of anxiety-induced bone loss, and revealed a population of somatostatin neurons in BNST not previously implicated in bone mass regulation. These findings thus identify the underlying central neural mechanism of psychiatric disorders, such as anxiety, that influences bone metabolism at the circuit level.One Sentence SummaryIdentification of a new GABAergic neural circuit from forebrain to hypothalamus used for regulation of anxiety-induced bone loss.

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