From reactive to proactive and selective control: developing a richer model for stopping inappropriate responses

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Psychiatry

Background:

• Impulse control is crucial in psychiatry, yet research primarily focuses on motor response inhibition.
• Current research often examines reactive control, where responses are stopped upon external signals.

Purpose of the Study:

• To review advancements in the cognitive neuroscience of stopping responses.
• To advocate for paradigms modeling proactive inhibitory control as more relevant to psychiatric applications than reactive control.

Main Methods:

• Review of recent developments in cognitive neuroscience research on response inhibition.
• Discussion of reactive control paradigms and their limitations.
• Advocacy for proactive control paradigms.

Main Results:

• Reactive control paradigms, while advanced, have limitations as models for psychiatric impulse control.
• Proactive inhibitory control, preparing to stop a response tendency based on internal goals, offers a more promising experimental model.

Conclusions:

• Proactive inhibitory control, driven by internal goals and selectively targeted, may be a more valid experimental model for stopping inappropriate responses in psychiatric contexts.
• Shifting focus to proactive control paradigms can enhance our understanding of neural systems underlying impulse control relevant to psychiatry.