Visual salience of the stop signal affects the neuronal dynamics of controlled inhibition

Abstract

The voluntary control of movement is often tested by using the countermanding, or stop-signal task that sporadically requires the suppression of a movement in response to an incoming stop-signal. Neurophysiological recordings in monkeys engaged in the countermanding task have shown that dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) is implicated in movement control. An open question is whether and how the perceptual demands inherent the stop-signal affects inhibitory performance and their underlying neuronal correlates. To this aim we recorded multi-unit activity (MUA) from the PMd of two male monkeys performing a countermanding task in which the salience of the stop-signals was modulated. Consistently to what has been observed in humans, we found that less salient stimuli worsened the inhibitory performance. At the neuronal level, these behavioral results were subtended by the following modulations: when the stop-signal was not noticeable compared to the salient condition the preparatory neuronal activity in PMd started to be affected later and with a less sharp dynamic. This neuronal pattern is probably the consequence of a less efficient inhibitory command useful to interrupt the neural dynamic that supports movement generation in PMd.

Dorsal Premotor Cortex Neurons Signal the Level of Choice Difficulty during Logical Decisions

“…In fact, the decrease in the overlap between target and non-target in the mental schema improved the performance, increased the number of neurons that were selective for the target, and anticipated the time of logical target selection. Similar behavioral and neuronal correlates have been observed in the perceptual decision tasks, in which the coherence of moving dots (Hanks and Summerfield, 2017), the proportion of colored dots (Coallier et al, 2015), the proportion of distracting items (Basso and Wurtz, 1997;Schall and Hanes, 1993), and visual salience (Pani et al, 2018;Shen et al, 2010) are manipulated.…”

Neuronal population dynamics during motor plan cancellation in non-human primates

“…Superior Colliculus (SC) reaches a fixed threshold, while the activity of fixation neurons decreases (Hanes et al, 1998;Paré and Hanes, 2003). However, the control of arm movement tested in equivalent countermanding tasks does not elicit a similar neuronal correlate, especially when tested at the single cell level (Mirabella et al, 2011;Stuphorn, 2015;Pani et al, 2013), and different cortical areas like motor and premotor cortices (especially dorsal premotor cortex, PMd) have been suggested to have a key role in movement inhibition (Mirabella et al, 2011;Mattia et al, 2012;Pani et al 2014;Pani et al 2018;Duque et al, 2012;Duque et al, 2017;Parmigiani and Cattaneo, 2018).…”

Color‐hierarchies in executive control of monkeys' behavior

“…Recent studies have shown that salient stimuli enhance response inhibition and trigger earlier and stronger modulation of movement‐related neuronal activity in the premotor cortex (Pani et al, 2018). The advantage of red color in triggering cognitive processes for inhibition of actions might be related to the greater “saliency” of red color.…”

“…Recent studies have shown that salient stimuli enhance response inhibition and trigger earlier and stronger modulation of movementrelated neuronal activity in the premotor cortex (Pani et al, 2018).…”