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Common neural processes during action-stopping and infrequent stimulus detection: The frontocentral P3 as an index of generic motor inhibition
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Common neural processes during action-stopping and infrequent stimulus detection: The frontocentral P3 as an index of generic motor inhibition

Darcy A Waller, Eliot Hazeltine and Jan R Wessel
International journal of psychophysiology, Vol.163, pp.11-21
05/2021
DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2019.01.004
PMID: 30659867
url
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2019.01.004View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

The stop-signal task (SST) is used to study action-stopping in the laboratory. In SSTs, the P3 event-related potential following stop-signals is considered to be a neural index of motor inhibition. However, a similar P3 deflection is often observed following infrequent events in non-inhibition tasks. Moreover, within SSTs, stop-signals are indeed infrequent events, presenting a systematic confound that hampers the interpretation of the stop-signal P3 (and other candidate neural indices of motor inhibition). Therefore, we performed two studies to test whether the stop-signal P3 is uniquely related to motor inhibition or reflects infrequency detection. In Study 1, participants completed the SST and a visually identical change-detection task requiring the detection of a task-relevant, frequent signal (but not motor inhibition). We observed a P3 associated with motor inhibition in the SST, but no such positivity in the change-detection task. In Study 2, we modified the change-detection task. Some task-relevant events were now infrequent, matching the frequency of stop-signals in the SST. These events indeed evoked a P3, though of smaller amplitude than the P3 in the SST. Independent component analysis suggested that stop-signal P3 and infrequency-P3 ERPs were non-independent and shared a common neural generator. Further analyses suggested that this common neural process likely reflects motor inhibition in both tasks: infrequent events in the change-detection task lead to a non-instructed, incidental slowing of motor responding, the degree of which was strongly correlated with P3 amplitude. These results have wide-reaching implications for the interpretation of neural signals in both stop-signal and infrequency/oddball-tasks. •We tested whether P3 in the stop-signal task can be explained by attentional detection.•Detecting frequent events did not elicit frontocentral P3, but infrequent events did.•Infrequency-P3 could be attributed to the same independent source as stop-signal P3.•Infrequent events induced incidental response slowing, correlated with P3 amplitude.
Motor inhibition Event-related potentials Action-stopping Infrequency detection Frontocentral P3

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