Cognitive control and automatic interference in mind and brain: A unified model of saccadic inhibition and countermanding.

Abstract

Countermanding behavior has long been seen as a cornerstone of executive control—the human ability to selectively inhibit undesirable responses and change plans. However, scattered evidence implies that stopping behavior is entangled with simpler automatic stimulus-response mechanisms. Here we operationalize this idea by merging the latest conceptualization of saccadic countermanding with a neural network model of visuo-oculomotor behavior that integrates bottom-up and top-down drives. This model accounts for all fundamental qualitative and quantitative features of saccadic countermanding, including neuronal activity. Importantly, it does so by using the same architecture and parameters as basic visually guided behavior and automatic stimulus-driven interference. Using simulations and new data, we compare the temporal dynamics of saccade countermanding with that of saccadic inhibition (SI), a hallmark effect thought to reflect automatic competition within saccade planning areas. We demonstrate how SI accounts for a large proportion of the saccade countermanding process when using visual signals. We conclude that top-down inhibition acts later, piggy-backing on the quicker automatic inhibition. This conceptualization fully accounts for the known effects of signal features and response modalities traditionally used across the countermanding literature. Moreover, it casts different light on the concept of top-down inhibition, its timing and neural underpinning, as well as the interpretation of stop-signal reaction time (RT), the main behavioral measure in the countermanding literature.

Temporally-precise disruption of prefrontal cortex informed by the timing of beta bursts impairs human action-stopping

“…4a ; Table 2 ). We therefore turned to a potentially more sensitive measure for evaluating the impact of TMS on behavior: examining Failed Stop response times as a function of the stop signal delay [see Bompas et al, 2020 for detail]. When a participant sees a stop signal, only the fastest responses escape inhibition (i.e.…”

“…Failed Stop trials). Bompas et al, 2020 , based on a distribution analysis over many trials, suggest that, for a particular stop signal delay, the time at which the Failed Stop diverges from Go trials is the earliest point at which stopping occurs. Here we looked at a subset of Failed Stop response times that: (i) had at least 3 observations for both TMS Real and TMS Sham ; and (ii) had a TMS pulse that occurred at least 60 ms before the response time (see Jana et al, 2020 for a discussion of why this corresponds to the key time period for rIFC mediated stopping).…”

Rapid stimulus-driven modulation of slow ocular position drifts

“…Saccadic inhibition is thought to reflect a resetting of ongoing saccadic rhythms to enable reacting (often with a subsequent eye movement) to the external stimulus arriving asynchronously to such rhythms ( Buonocore et al, 2017a ; Hafed and Ignashchenkova, 2013 ). Increasing behavioral work is also suggesting that the brief period of such saccadic inhibition additionally provides an important time window during which perceptual and cognitive processing of the incoming external stimulus could proceed ( Bompas et al, 2020 ; Buonocore et al, 2017b ; Salinas and Stanford, 2018 ). As part of this brief processing, under some situations like in our image patterns that caused the drift response, it might be important to modulate the visual statistics of the input images with drift eye movements.…”

Top-down control of saccades requires inhibition of suddenly appearing stimuli

“…However, our data cannot reveal if onsets increased or decreased saccade latencies, especially since we lack an informative control condition. Sudden distractor onsets can also give rise to saccadic inhibition that is characterized by a dip in the latency distribution around 70-100 ms after distractor onset (Bompas, Campbell, & Sumner, 2020;Bompas & Sumner, 2015;Buonocore & McIntosh, 2008;Edelman & Xu, 2009;Reingold & Stampe, 1999. Saccadic inhibition is thought to arise from competing activation in saccade planning areas like the superior collicus (SC; Dorris, Olivier, & Munoz, 2007;Meeter, Van der Stigchel, & Theeuwes, 2010;White et al, 2013).…”