Shared and selective neural correlates of inhibition, facilitation, and shifting processes during executive control

“Several current conceptions of executive control, broadly defined as the organization and manipulation of information in service of goal-oriented behavior, envision multiple component processes, although the parsing of components and their hierarchical organization in the human brain remains controversial (Banich, 200…”

“Anatomical regions were identified using the WFU PickAtlas tool (Maldjian et al., 2004; Maldjian et al., 2003) with a 3-dimensional dilation of 1 voxel.”

“However, the regions that met the strong criterion did not include the right inferior frontal gyrus, a region implicated in inhibition by many prior studies (Aron et al., 2004b).”

“There may be several possible types of inhibition, each of which may rely on a slightly different set of neural regions (Friedman and Miyake, 2004; Nee et al., 2007).”

“In keeping with this possibility, a homologous region in left VLPFC (BA 44) that has been implicated in selection processes also displayed activation during both inhibitory and facilitative processing (Badre et al., 2005; Thompson-Schill et al., 2005; Thompson-Schill et al., 1997).”

“It remains to be seen how these preferential regions fit within proposed schemes of hierarchical control processes (Banich, 2009; Koechlin et al., 2003) and whether these regions show their component-specific processing in isolation or in conjunction with other regions, in other task domains, or in…”

“Laboratory assessment of set shifting We measured set shifting ability by administering a standard global / local task ( based on Hedden & Gabrieli , 2010 ) .”

“It also plays a role in mediating cortical activation in the ACC and prefrontal regions to enhance switching the focus of attention between stimulus representations (Hedden & Gabrieli, 2010).”

“This activation pattern is largely consistent with previous literature indicating that these brain areas are fundamental to the monitoring and inhibitory processes, respectively, that are thought to take place in non-linguistic switching tasks (Botvinick et al., 2004; Hedden and Gabrieli, 2010; Hyafil et al., 2009; Ro…”

“…spatial orientation, tone discrimination, finger movement sequencing, and categorization of faces, as well as tasks using semantic stimuli (Hedden & Gabrieli, 2010; Ciaramelli, Grady, & Moscovitch, 2008; Collette, Hogge, Salmon, & Van der Linden, 2006; Duncan, 2006; Wager, Jonides, &…”

“Most of the frontal regions activated have also been independently implicated in general executive control, supporting a connection between the domains (e.g., Abutalebi & Green, 2008; Hedden & Gabrieli, 2010; see also Bialystok et al., 2005; Luk, Anderson, Craik, Grady & Bialystok, 2010).”

“…between the current study and the only other study that aimed at disentangling the neural correlates of cognitive stability and flexibility (Hedden & Gabrieli, 2010): the operationalization of cognitive flexibility and the complete lack of IFJ activation in the study of Hedden and Gabrieli (2010).”

“…inferior frontal gyrus, left middle temporal gyrus, and anterior cingulated cortex, are involved in bilingual languageswitching and dual language processing (e.g., Hernández et al., 2000; Abutalebi and Green, 2008; Toro et al., 2008; Hedden and Gabrieli, 2010; Rubio-Fernández and Glucksberg, 2012).”

“…and pre-SMA, and IPL, have been implicated in inhibitory control (e.g., Braver, Barch, Gray, Molfese, & Snyder, 2001; Coutlee & Huettel, 2011; Hedden & Gabrielli, 2010; Rubia et al., 2001; Tabu, Mima, Aso, Takahashi, & Fukuyama, 2011; Tanji & Hoshi, 2008; Zheng, Oka, Bokura, & Yamaguchi,…”

“There are several brain areas involved commonly in different executive processes, whereas other brain areas are involved only in specific executive processes (e.g., only for shifting; Hedden & Gabrieli, 2010).”

“The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region that plays a major role in executive function (EF), is influenced by dopaminergic pathways and input form the basal ganglia (BG) (Hedden and Gabrieli 2010; Nieoullon 2002).”

“This portion of LPFC is also recruited when multiple attributes of a stimulus compete for attentional resources and task demands necessitate the selection of a specific attribute (Hedden & Gabrieli, 2010; Nelson, Reuter- Lorenz, Sylvester, Jonides, & Smith, 2003).”

“…evidence for the inhibition factor in children (Huizinga et al., 2006; van der Sluis et al., 2007) or variance that is specific to the inhibition factor after controlling for variance that is common to other executive functions in adults (Friedman et al., 2008; see also Hedden and Gabrieli, 2010).”

“Nevertheless, it has been posited that response inhibition and set shifting share common underlying cognitive processes and neural substrates [64, 65], and as such, it seems quite plausible that evidence supporting alcohol’s effects on these two processes would be similarly compelling.”

“either ventral and dorsal regions or anterior (head) and posterior (body) portions.(11,30,31) The ventral caudate, via its interconnections with the orbitofrontal, medial prefrontal, and anterior and midcingulate cortical areas, participates in emotional and affective aspects of behavior such as reward processing.”

“…in the right inferior parietal lobe is often observed during inhibition-related tasks, its contribution to task success is seldom discussed from a theoretical standpoint (Kramer, Knight, & Munte, 2011; Hedden & Gabrieli, 2010; Aron & Poldrack, 2006; Rubia et al., 2001; Garavan et al., 1999).”

“Structural and functional neuroimaging studies reveal that age-related changes in frontostriatal systems underlie those cognitive declines whereas spared functions reflect the lesser changes occurring in medial temporal systems (Buckner 2004; Eyler et al. 2011; Hedden and Gabrieli 2010; Kaup et al. 2011).”

“This is well in line with studies stressing the importance of parietal areas for working memory and task switching processes (e.g. Gottlieb, 2007; Hedden and Gabrieli, 2010; Jamadar et al., 2010).”

“Cognitive flexibility can be tested in terms of reversal learning, such as in the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test [8,9], in terms of cue based switching of attention to a different stimulus or stimulus dimension within a single task [10,11], or in terms of cue based task switching [12–15] in which different tasks have to…”

“Functional MRI studies have revealed co-activation of the striatum and the prefrontal cortex during performances associated with executive functioning (Cools et al., 2002; Hedden and Gabrieli, 2010).”

“Cerebral Cortex May 2012;22:1038--1051 doi:10.1093/cercor/bhr172 Advance Access publication July 17, 2011”

“On the other hand, task-switching per se is not necessarily associated with right prefrontal activations (Brass & von Cramon, 2004; Hedden & Gabrieli, 2010).”

“The IPL has been implicated in executive function and inhibitory control (e.g., Hedden and Gabrieli 2010 ), so decreased activation in our study could reflect deficiencies in these functions.”

“…might influence the recruitment of neural systems is considered as the key to understanding the brain organization of cognitive control (Barch et al., 2001; Fan et al., 2003; Wittfoth et al., 2006, 2009; Nee et al., 2007; Roberts andHall, 2008; Hedden and Gabrieli, 2010; Jiang and Egner, 2014).”

“Response inhibition is defined as the ability to suppress irrelevant or inappropriate actions in response to a novel information (Albert et al. 2010; Hedden and Gabrieli 2010).”

“…executive functions that control this switching, including possible commonalities with mechanisms recruited for switching between strategies (Yoshida et al., 2009), updating contents of working memory (Bledowski et al., 2010), and selective attention (Hedden and Gabrieli, 2010; Wager et al., 2005).”

“…in working memory (e.g., difficulties in maintaining competing rule sets) and/or inhibition abilities (e.g., inhibiting the currently active rule set prior to shifting to the competing rule; Bellgrove et al., 2003; Bialystok, 2010; Hedden & Gabrieli, 2010; Hubner, 2000; Yerys et al., 2009).”

“On the other hand, task-switching does not seem to be generally associated with right prefrontal involvement (e.g., Brass & von Cramon, 2004; Hedden & Gabrieli, 2010).”

“2015) and tasks requiring some forms of cognitive flexibility (Hedden and Gabrieli 2010).”

“Compound letter paradigms have been used previously in neuroimaging studies of attentional control and attentional set-shifting [29,30,31,32,33] and in neuropsychological studies of PD [34,35,36].”

“In addition, Shaw et al. (2015) observed that the fronto-parietal network is also particularly involved during executive processes in healthy older adults (see also Hedden and Gabrieli (2010) and Hedden et al. (2012)).”

“In the current study, we found that intentional forgetting was associated with greater activations in right middle frontal gyrus, and this region has been interpreted as reflecting inhibitory processing (Anderson et al., 2004; Hedden and Gabrieli, 2010).”

“Likewise, a more general contribution of these two regions to the cognitive control (selective attention, response selection, response inhibition and task switching) is also recognised (Hedden and Gabrieli, 2010; Jahfari et al., 2011; Robbins, 2007; Robinson et al., 2012).”

“In a previous study (Rushworth et al., 2001) that aimed at differentiating distinct processes in parietal cortex, the authors also related intentional switching of stimulus–response mapping rules to both IPS and posterior SPL.”

“…contour integration, finger tapping, Navon global–local task, V1, M1, DLPC, brain maturation, gender differences INTRODUCTION Early postmortem (e.g., Huttenlocher, 1990; Huttenlocher and Dabholkar, 1997) and positron emission tomography (Chugani et al., 1987; Chugani, 1994) studies on cortical…”

“The caudate nucleus, and the basal ganglia in general, have been shown to play a role in mediating cortical activation in the ACC and prefrontal regions to enhance switching the focus of attention between stimulus representations [9].”

“the human brain has been recently demonstrated in an fMRI experiment [26].”

“It has been found to be activated, together with other fronto-parietal regions, across diverse executive functions such as flexibility, inhibition, shifting, and working memory (Hedden and Gabrieli, 2010; Niendam et al., 2012).”

“The striatum is one of the main neural structures of the extrapyramidal motor system.(36) The striatum has various brain functions, including motor control and learning, language, reward, cognitive functioning, and addiction through the functional cortico-striato-thalamocortical neural pathways.”

“The striatum is one of the main neural structures of the extrapyramidal motor system, which includes the caudate nucleus and lentiform nucleus, the latter of which is divided into the putamen and pallidum (Hedden and Gabrieli, 2010).”

“The lateral prefrontal cortex has been related to set switching and to other cognitive control processes, such as response inhibition or conflict detection [43,45,49].”

“…of the middle frontal gyrus (MFG), which is important for both cognitive control and emotional regulation (Anderson et al., 2004; Blair et al., 2007; Hedden & Gabrieli, 2010; Kohn et al., 2014; Levens et al., 2011; Lévesque et al., 2003; Ohira et al., 2006; Yamasaki et al., 2013; Yang…”

“…the posterior superior temporal gyrus) are involved in moral decision making and empathy (Decety & Lamm, 2007; Moll, de Oliveira-Souza, & Eslinger, 2003; Raine & Yang, 2006), and a recent study has also suggested that temporal-parietal junction is involved in inhibition (Hedden & Gabrieli, 2010).”

“…are antagonistically related and depend on one common neural network or whether they rely on two separate, that is, neurally distinct and orthogonal mechanisms (e.g., Draheim, Hicks, & Engle, 2016; Hedden & Gabrieli, 2015; Armbruster, Ueltzhöffer, Basten, & Fiebach, 2012; Müller et al., 2007).”

“The ventrolateral prefrontal cortex is another brain region that has been implicated in this kind of inhibitory cognitive control of behavior (Aron, Robbins, & Poldrack, 2004; Buchsbaum, Greer, Chang, & Berman, 2005; Chikazoe, 2010; Dillon & Pizzagalli, 2007; Hedden & Gabrieli, 2010).”

“…IFG was located slightly more anterior at the border between BA 45 and 47, more closely corresponding to the activation sites reported in studies that argue for a role of the IFG in focusing attention onto currently task relevant stimulus aspects (Hampshire et al., 2010; Hedden and Gabrieli, 2010).”

“Although the precise mechanisms involved in task shifting are not yet known, several studies indicate that outward expressions of task shifting activate similar brain regions (Gerrits, van den Heuvel, & van der Werf, 2015; Hedden and Gabrieli, 2010; Ravizza and Carter, 2008).”

“For example, in the study by Hedden and Gabrieli [12], the color of the composite letter stimulus informed participants whether they should attend and respond the global or local stimulus features.”

“Within the parietal lobe, exercise-related increases were seen in the inferior regions, which are involved in visuospatial processing (Alain et al., 2008), attentional shifting (Hedden & Gabrieli, 2010) and target selection (Collette et al., 2005).”

“Flexibility and stability of prediction thus share some processes, while they differ in others (Hedden and Gabrieli, 2015; Armbruster et al. 2012).”

“Although the parietal cortex is known to play an important role in inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility (Hedden and Gabrieli, 2010; Fedorenko et al., 2013; Tang et al., 2016; Tschentscher et al., 2017; Hartung et al., 2021), the role of the parietal cortex in BI is unclear.”

“In particular, both neuropsychological and functional neuroimaging data indicate that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is particularly involved in planning [9], working memory [10], divided attention [11], and shifting aptitude [12] abilities, and that the dorsomesial prefrontal regions with contiguous anterior cing…”

“With regard to neural bases, the inhibitory control necessary for the correct performance of incongruent trials has been related to the predominantly right activation of the middle frontal gyrus, superior frontal gyrus, and inferior parietal lobe (Hedden and Gabrieli, 2010), so the more rapid and marked atrophy of the…”