Vocal response inhibition is enhanced by anodal tDCS over the right prefrontal cortex.

Stopping outright (reactive inhibition) and slowing down (proactive inhibition) are types of response inhibition which have mainly been investigated in the manual effector system. This study compared reactive inhibition across manual and vocal effector systems, examined the effects of excitatory anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (anodal tDCS) over the right prefrontal cortex (right-PFC) and looked at the relationship between reactive and proactive inhibition. We hypothesised (1) that vocal reactive inhibition would be less effective than manual reactive inhibition as evidenced by longer stop signal reaction times; (2) that anodal tDCS would enhance both vocal and manual reactive inhibitions and (3) that proactive and reactive inhibitions would be positively related. We tested 14 participants over two sessions (one session with anodal tDCS and one session with sham stimulation) and applied stimulation protocol in the middle of the session, i.e. only during the second of three phases. We used a stop signal task across two stop conditions: relevant and irrelevant stop conditions in which stopping was required or ignored, respectively. We found that reactive inhibition was faster during and immediately after anodal tDCS relative to sham. We also found that greater level of proactive inhibition enhanced reactive inhibition (indexed by shorter stop signal reaction times). These results support the hypothesis that the right-PFC is part of a core network for reactive inhibition and supports previous contention that proactive inhibition is possibly modulated via preactivating the reactive inhibition network.

The effects of impulsivity and proactive inhibition on reactive inhibition and the go process: insights from vocal and manual stop signal tasks.

This study measured proactive and reactive response inhibition and their relationships with self-reported impulsivity. We examined the domains of both vocal and manual responding using a stop signal task (SST) with two stop probabilities: high and low probability stop (1/3 and 1/6 stops respectively). Our aim was to evaluate the effect stop probability would have on reactive and proactive inhibition. We tested 44 subjects and found that for the high compared to low probability stop signal condition, more proactive inhibition was evident and this was correlated with a reduction in the stop signal reaction time (SSRT). We found that reactive inhibition had a positive relationship with dysfunctional but not functional impulsivity in both vocal and manual domains of responding. These findings support the hypothesis that proactive inhibition may pre-activate the network for reactive inhibition.