CCN meeting | Ricci Hannah (King's College London, United Kingdom)

Inhibitory control of human action

Abstract: Our ability to interact flexibly with the environment and with other people relies, in part, on the ability to regulate when and whether to act. Imagine a sprinter on the starting block, ready to react but waiting for the start gun so as to avoid a false start. Or gossiping about a colleague and having to stop when they enter the room. Both examples of behavioural inhibition (delaying actions or stopping them outright) are thought to rely on neural circuitry in the brain that acts to suppress the excitability of the output pathways of the motor system, and hence reduce its capacity to drive movement. In a series of experiments, we show that the delaying and stopping actions are underwritten by distinct neurophysiological processes. Moreover, we provide strong support for a prominent neuroanatomical model of action stopping in healthy humans that involves a prefrontal-basal-ganglia-thalamocortical network. With a growing body of support for the neuroanatomical model, it is time to ask whether the model applies beyond simple laboratory stop signal tasks (i.e. generalising to real-world actions) and whether it has clinical relevance to movement disorders.