Inhibition and the right inferior frontal cortex

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Abstract

It is controversial whether different cognitive functions can be mapped to discrete regions of the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The localisationist tradition has associated one cognitive function – inhibition – by turns with dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), inferior frontal cortex (IFC), or orbital frontal cortex (OFC). Inhibition is postulated to be a mechanism by which PFC exerts its effects on subcortical and posterior-cortical regions to implement executive control. We review evidence concerning inhibition of responses and task-sets. Whereas neuroimaging implicates diverse PFC foci, advances in human lesion-mapping support the functional localization of such inhibition to right IFC alone. Future research should investigate the generality of this proposed inhibitory function to other task domains, and its interaction within a wider network.

Section snippets

The right IFC and inhibitory control

Historically, an important paradigm for studying executive control has been the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). The subject sorts a series of cards on different dimensions such as colour, number and shape. Once the subject has established the currently appropriate rule (e.g. ‘sort successive cards by color’), the experimenter gives negative feedback, and the subject is required to change classification to another dimension. Patients with frontal cortical damage are notoriously bad at the

Neurophysiological evidence

Although we have argued from the above evidence that functional activations in the right IFC reflect a cognitive inhibitory mechanism and that lesions to this region in non-human primates and humans alike disrupt this mechanism, it is unclear how cognitive inhibition relates to inhibition in a neural sense (by ‘neural’ we mean the systems level rather than that of single neurons).

Evidence for systems-level inhibition underlying cognitive inhibition comes from monkey neurophysiology [60].

Defining inhibition in neural-systems terms

A component of executive control, cognitive inhibition, can be localized to a specific subregion of the PFC, the right IFC (in particular, the pars opercularis1). The voluntary blocking of memory retrieval might also depend on this same region, and a wider prediction is that any task requiring cognitive suppression of responses, task-sets or memories will be affected by damage or momentary deactivation of this

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Luke Clark and Anthony Wagner for helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

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