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

Abstract

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. When planning to execute an action, various inhibitory control mechanisms are activated to prevent the unwanted release of impulses and to ensure that the correct response is produced. A great body of research has used various cognitive tasks to isolate one or more components of inhibitory control (e.g., response selectivity) and to investigate their neuronal underpinnings. However, inter-individual differences in behavior are rarely properly considered, although they often represent a considerable source of noise in the data. In the present review, we will address this issue using the specific case of action inhibition, presenting the results of studies that coupled the so-called Go/NoGo paradigm with non-invasive brain stimulation to directly test the effects of motor inhibition on the excitability of the corticospinal system (CSE). Motor preparation is rarely measured in action inhibition studies, and participants’ compliancy to the task’s requests is often assumed rather than tested. Single pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a powerful tool to directly measure CSE, whose responsivity depends on both excitatory and inhibitory processes. However, when motor preparation is not measured and the task design does not require participants to prepare responses in advance, fluctuations in CSE levels can be mistaken for active inhibition. One way to isolate motor preparation is to use a carefully designed task that allows to control for excessive variability in the timing of activation of inhibitory control mechanisms. Here, we review single pulse TMS studies that have used variants of the Go/NoGo task to investigate inhibitory control functions in healthy participants. We will identify the specific strategies that likely induced motor preparation in participants, and their results will be compared to current theories of action inhibition.

Effects of Physically Active Lessons on Movement Behaviors, Cognitive, and Academic Performance in Elementary Schoolchildren: ERGUER/Aracaju Project

“…The executive functions evaluated were the following: (1) Inhibitory control uses the go/no go 32 test, a well-known and widely used task to evaluate different developed conditions, 33 which consists of the graphic presentation of various figures in the form of traffic lights where the colors green and red are randomly alternated (When the figure with the green traffic light appears, the child should press a computer key. When the red traffic light appears, the child should wait for the figure to change without pressing any key); (2) selective attention uses the visual search 34 test, another well-known task, 29 which consists in a set of the letter "T" which are present randomly distributed on the screen with different colors and some of them flipped (The child is instructed to press a computer key whenever at least a letter T appears in red and in its regular upright position.…”

Do sounds near the hand facilitate tactile reaction times? Four experiments and a meta-analysis provide mixed support and suggest a small effect size

“…The alerting effect of nearby sounds may be particularly strong for responses that are given less frequently, or when responses are not being prepared. The Go/No task is complex: different response preparation and inhibition processes depend on the proportion of responses required, the time between trials, and the instructions to participants (Ficarella and Battelli 2019). Decreasing the probability of Go trials from 75 to 25%, for example, leads to RT increases of 140 ms (Low and Miller 1999).…”

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

“…While absent peripheral muscular activity may result from efficient impulse control, and also from a mere absence of response preparation, strong EMG activity is likely the result of robust motor preparation that is barely kept under control by such proactive mechanisms. As claimed elsewhere [ 20 , 21 ], very few action inhibition studies have tested for the presence of ongoing motor preparation activities, assuming that participants prepare the instructed response before target onset. In this study, we used EMG to assess whether motor preparation was present before target onset (see Section 2 for details).…”

“…While the interplay between proactive inhibition and motor preparation is complex, the latter is recognized as the critical factor disentangling a (pro)active inhibitory process from a strategic delay in motor planning [ 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 ]. As a matter of fact, planned actions that need to be withheld for a fixed, short duration might not necessarily rely on such “impulse control” mechanisms [ 20 ].…”