PLoS ONE (Jan 2012)

Cognitive control reflects context monitoring, not motoric stopping, in response inhibition.

  • Christopher H Chatham,
  • Eric D Claus,
  • Albert Kim,
  • Tim Curran,
  • Marie T Banich,
  • Yuko Munakata

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0031546
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 7, no. 2
p. e31546

Abstract

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The inhibition of unwanted behaviors is considered an effortful and controlled ability. However, inhibition also requires the detection of contexts indicating that old behaviors may be inappropriate--in other words, inhibition requires the ability to monitor context in the service of goals, which we refer to as context-monitoring. Using behavioral, neuroimaging, electrophysiological and computational approaches, we tested whether motoric stopping per se is the cognitively-controlled process supporting response inhibition, or whether context-monitoring may fill this role. Our results demonstrate that inhibition does not require control mechanisms beyond those involved in context-monitoring, and that such control mechanisms are the same regardless of stopping demands. These results challenge dominant accounts of inhibitory control, which posit that motoric stopping is the cognitively-controlled process of response inhibition, and clarify emerging debates on the frontal substrates of response inhibition by replacing the centrality of controlled mechanisms for motoric stopping with context-monitoring.