Non-selective inhibition of inappropriate motor-tendencies during response-conflict by a fronto-subthalamic mechanism
- University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, United States
- University of Iowa, United States
Abstract
To effectively interact with their environment, humans must often select actions from multiple incompatible options. Existing theories propose that during motoric response-conflict, inappropriate motor activity is actively (and perhaps non-selectively) suppressed by an inhibitory fronto-basal ganglia mechanism. We here tested this theory across three experiments. First, using scalp-EEG, we found that both outright action-stopping and response-conflict during action-selection invoke low-frequency activity of a common fronto-central source, whose activity relates to trial-by-trial behavioral indices of inhibition in both tasks. Second, using simultaneous intracranial recordings from the basal ganglia and motor cortex, we found that response-conflict increases the influence of the subthalamic nucleus on M1-representations of incorrect response-tendencies. Finally, using transcranial magnetic stimulation, we found that during the same time period when conflict-related STN-to-M1 communication is increased, cortico-spinal excitability is broadly suppressed. Together, these findings demonstrate that fronto-BG networks buttress action-selection under response-conflict by rapidly and non-selectively net-inhibiting inappropriate motor tendencies.
Data availability
The experimental code, data, and analysis routines underlying this research can be found on the Open Science Framework at the following URL: https://osf.io/k3ypt/.
-
Data from: Non-selective inhibition of inappropriate motor-tendencies during response-conflict by a fronto-subthalamic mechanismOpen Science Framework, osf.io/k3ypt.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (R01 NS102201)
- Jan R Wessel
National Science Foundation (CAREER 1752355)
- Jan R Wessel
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: Informed consent was collected from all subjects and all procedures were approved by the local ethics committee at the University of Iowa (IRB #201511709, IRB # 201402720, IRB #201612707).
Copyright
© 2019, Wessel et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 1,764
- views
-
- 229
- downloads
-
- 57
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Non-selective inhibition of inappropriate motor-tendencies during response-conflict by a fronto-subthalamic mechanism
eLife 8:e42959.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.42959
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
Combining electrophysiological, anatomical and functional brain maps reveals networks of beta neural activity that align with dopamine uptake.
-
- Neuroscience
During rest and sleep, memory traces replay in the brain. The dialogue between brain regions during replay is thought to stabilize labile memory traces for long-term storage. However, because replay is an internally-driven, spontaneous phenomenon, it does not have a ground truth - an external reference that can validate whether a memory has truly been replayed. Instead, replay detection is based on the similarity between the sequential neural activity comprising the replay event and the corresponding template of neural activity generated during active locomotion. If the statistical likelihood of observing such a match by chance is sufficiently low, the candidate replay event is inferred to be replaying that specific memory. However, without the ability to evaluate whether replay detection methods are successfully detecting true events and correctly rejecting non-events, the evaluation and comparison of different replay methods is challenging. To circumvent this problem, we present a new framework for evaluating replay, tested using hippocampal neural recordings from rats exploring two novel linear tracks. Using this two-track paradigm, our framework selects replay events based on their temporal fidelity (sequence-based detection), and evaluates the detection performance using each event's track discriminability, where sequenceless decoding across both tracks is used to quantify whether the track replaying is also the most likely track being reactivated.
