The role of motor inhibition in implicit negation processing: two Go/NoGo behavioral studies

Abstract

Several studies demonstrated that the processing of explicit forms of negation recruits motor inhibitory mechanisms. However, whether this is also true for implicit negation, in which the negative meaning is implicated but not explicitly lexicalized in the sentence (e.g., “I ignore”), has never been studied before. This study aims to address this issue via two Go/NoGo experiments applied to the processing of affirmative, explicit and implicit negation sentences, which differed for the response time-windows to the Go stimulus available to participants. We investigated whether: (i) the processing of implicit negations recruits inhibitory mechanisms; (ii) the inhibitory control mechanisms are differently modulated by implicit and explicit negations. Since we posit that motor inhibitory mechanisms are modulated by both (i) the polarity of the sentence and (ii) the Go/NoGo paradigm, two after-effect analyses on reaction times in Go trials were carried out. Results suggest that implicit negation sentences determine stronger involvement of motor inhibitory mechanisms than the explicit ones. The different processing of the two forms of negation could be explained by the more negative emotional valence of implicit negation and by its inferential nature, which might require deeper processing of the negative meaning, leading to greater activation of the sensory-motor system.

Consensus Paper: Current Perspectives on Abstract Concepts and Future Research Directions

“…Furthermore, several studies using different neuro-behavioural techniques have demonstrated that the presence of negation in a hand-related negative sentence reduces the activation of the corresponding motor areas compared to its affirmative counterparts (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging: Tettamanti et al, 2008;Tomasino et al, 2010;electroencephalography (EEG): Alemanno et al, 2012;paired-pulses Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: Liuzza et al, 2011;Papeo et al, 2016; kinematic measures and grasp force: Aravena et al, 2012;Bartoli et al, 2013). More recently, a series of studies have been carried out to investigate whether the processing of sentence negation involves motor inhibitory mechanisms (Beltrán et al, 2018;Beltrán et al, 2019;Foroni & Semin, 2013;García-Marco et al, 2019;Liu et al, 2019Liu et al, /2020Papeo et al, 2016;de Vega et al, 2016;Montalti et al, 2021a;Montalti et al, 2021b;Vitale et al, 2022). The majority of these studies used paradigms such as the Stop Signal Task (Logan et al, 1984) and the Go/NoGo task, which have been developed to measure motor response inhibition, embedded in a sentence comprehension task.…”