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Perceptual Surprise Aides Inhibitory Motor Control
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Perceptual Surprise Aides Inhibitory Motor Control

Jan R Wessel
Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance, Vol.43(9), pp.1585-1593
09/2017
DOI: 10.1037/xhp0000452
PMID: 28557496

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Abstract

Neurophysiological studies of cortico-motor excitability have shown that unexpected sounds are followed by motor inhibition. In a recent study, Leiva, Parmentier, Elchlepp, and Verbruggen (2015) derived a prediction from these findings: unexpected, task-irrelevant sounds should increase the ability to withhold motor responses in a Go/NoGo task. Contrary to that prediction, they found that playing unexpected sounds before NoGo-stimuli decreased the likelihood of successful motor inhibition. However, we here argue that the relative timing of unexpected events relative to NoGo-related motor activity is key. Cortico-motor inhibition can be found only until ∼150 ms after the onset of unexpected sounds. Therefore, since Leiva et al. (2015) placed their sounds 200 ms prior to NoGo-stimuli, the inhibitory influence of unexpected sounds may have fully abated before the critical inhibitory period. Consequently, we here repeated their study, with 1 key change: task-irrelevant sounds were presented 50 ms after NoGo-stimulus onset, which ensures that cortico-motor inhibition takes place when motor inhibition is needed. Across 4 experiments, this changed timing produced the results predicted by the previous cortico-motor suppression findings: More responses were successfully withheld after unexpected sounds. These data provide new evidence for the fact that unexpected events can engage an inhibitory control process and benefit motor inhibition. Public Significance Statement Recent neurophysiological studies have shown that unexpected events elicit activity in brain networks associated with the stopping of action and broadly suppress the excitability of the motor system. This implies the possibility that when humans rapidly have to stop an action, the occurrence of an unexpected event may help them do so. Across 4 experiments, we find that when unexpected sounds are played shortly (50 ms) after the onset of a stimulus that requires the stopping of a prepotent motor response, human participants are indeed better at stopping their actions. This points toward a crucial interaction between action stopping and surprise processing in humans, suggesting that motor inhibition and attentional processing are tightly linked.
 surprise attention motor inhibition novelty unexpected events

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