Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2012;7(3):e34482.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0034482. Epub 2012 Mar 28.

Dissociable components of cognitive control: an event-related potential (ERP) study of response inhibition and interference suppression

Christopher R Brydges  1 , Karen Clunies-Ross, Madeleine Clohessy, Zhao Li Lo, An Nguyen, Claire Rousset, Patrick Whitelaw, Yit Jing Yeap, Allison M Fox
Affiliations

Dissociable components of cognitive control: an event-related potential (ERP) study of response inhibition and interference suppression

Christopher R Brydges et al. PLoS One. 2012.

Abstract

Background: Cognitive control refers to the ability to selectively attend and respond to task-relevant events while resisting interference from distracting stimuli or prepotent automatic responses. The current study aimed to determine whether interference suppression and response inhibition are separable component processes of cognitive control.

Methodology/principal findings: Fourteen young adults completed a hybrid Go/Nogo flanker task and continuous EEG data were recorded concurrently. The incongruous flanker condition (that required interference suppression) elicited a more centrally distributed topography with a later N2 peak than the Nogo condition (that required response inhibition).

Conclusions/significance: These results provide evidence for the dissociability of interference suppression and response inhibition, indicating that taxonomy of inhibition is warranted with the integration of research evidence from neuroscience.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. The six stimuli used in the present experiment.
Figure 2
Figure 2. Stimulus-locked ERP waveforms, difference waveforms, and scalp topographic maps.
Left-hand panel: Grand-averaged ERP in response to congruous (blue), incongruous (red), and Nogo (green) stimuli with the amplitude (µV) as the y-axis and time (ms) as the x-axis. Time 0 represents stimulus onset. Middle panel: Grand-averaged difference waveforms computed as the incongruous – congruous waveform (red) and Nogo – congruous (green). Right-hand panel: Topographic distribution of amplitude at the peak latency of the N2 identified in the difference waveforms (incongruous – congruous is shown in the upper map, and Nogo – congruous is shown in the lower map).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Michel F, Anderson M. Using the antisaccade task to investigate the relationship between the development of inhibition and the developmnet of intelligence. Developmental Science. 2009;12:272–288. - PubMed
    1. Ridderinkhof KR, van den Wildenberg WPM, Segalowitz SJ, Carter CS. Neurocognitive mechanisms of cognitive control: The role of prefrontal cortex in action selection, response inhibition, performance monitoring, and reward-based learning. Brain and Cognition. 2004;56:129–140. - PubMed
    1. Dempster FN. Inhibitory processes: A neglected dimension of intelligence. Intelligence. 1991;15:157–173.
    1. Garavan H, Ross TJ, Stein EA. Right hemispheric dominance of inhibitory control: An event-related functional MRI study. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. 1999;96:8301–8306. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Friedman NP, Miyake A, Corley RP, Young SE, DeFries J, et al. Not all executive functions are related to intelligence. Psychological Science. 2006;17:172–179. - PubMed

Publication types