Specific proactive and generic reactive inhibition

Inhibition concerns the capacity to suppress on-going response tendencies. Patient data and results from neuro-imaging and magnetic-stimulation studies point to a proactive mechanism involving top-down control signals that potentiate inhibitory sensory-motor connections, depending on whether possibly necessary inhibition is anticipated or not. The proactive mechanism is manifest in stronger sensory-cortex responses to stop signals yielding successful inhibition, observed as a modulation of short-latency human evoked potentials (N1) which may overlap with generic mechanisms for infrequent-event detection. A second, reactive, mechanism would be much more independent of the specific inhibition context, and generalize to situations in which behavioral interrupt is not dictated by task demands but invoked by the salience of task-irrelevant but potentially distracting events. The reactive mechanism is visible in a longer-latency human event-related potential termed frontal P3 (fP3) which is elicited by (successful) stop stimuli and most likely originates from dorsal-medial prefrontal cortex (preSMA), and is dissociated from the proactive mechanism pharmacologically and by individual differences. Implications may arise for more personalized treatments of disorders such as ADHD.