Evidence for spatial tuning of movement inhibition

The time to initiate a movement can, even implicitly, be influenced by the environment. All primates, including humans, respond faster and with greater accuracy to stimuli that are brighter, louder or associated with larger reward, than to neutral stimuli. Whether this environment also modulates the executive functions which allow ongoing actions to be suppressed remains an issue of debate. In this study, we investigated the implicit learning of spatial selectivity of movement inhibition in humans and macaque monkeys performing a saccade-countermanding task. The occurrence of stop trials, in which subjects were visually instructed to cancel a prepared movement, was manipulated according to the target location. One visual target was associated with higher probability of stop signal appearance (e.g., 80 %), while the second target was associated with low fraction of stop (e.g., 20 %). The absolute occurrence of stop trials across the two targets (50 %) remains constant. The results show that human and macaque monkeys can selectively adapt their behaviors according to the implicit probability of stopping. Behavioral adjustments were larger when targets were in different hemifields and for larger distances between targets. Reduced selective inhibitory behaviors were observed when 15° of visual angle separated the targets, and this effect vanished when targets were separated by only 2°. Overall, our study shows that both response and inhibition times can be modulated by the relative spatial occurrence of stop signals. We speculate that beyond the particular effect we observed in the context of the saccade paradigm, selective motor execution may imply a disinhibitory mechanism that modulates the motor pathways associated with the fronto-median cortex and basal ganglia circuits.