A unified framework for inhibitory control

By Yuko Munakata, Seth A. Herd, Christopher H. Chatham, B. Depue, Marie T. Banich, Randall C. O'Reilly. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2011

635 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Inhibiting unwanted thoughts, actions and emotions figures centrally in daily life, and the prefrontal cortex is widely viewed as a source of this inhibitory control. We argue that the function of the prefrontal cortex is best understood in terms of representing and actively maintaining abstract information such as goals, which produces two types of inhibitory effects on other brain regions. Inhibition of some subcortical regions takes a directed, global form, with prefrontal regions providing contextual information relevant to when to inhibit all processing in a region. Inhibition within neocortical (and some subcortical) regions takes an indirect, competitive form, with prefrontal regions providing excitation of goal-relevant options. These distinctions are critical for understanding the mechanisms of inhibition and how they can be impaired or improved.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/388e196edb782df128ddc5fc84d51348d529d993

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Moderate Levels of Activation Lead to Forgetting In the Think/No-Think Paradigm (2013, neutral): “In the Newman and Norman (2010) priming study, participants were presented with two stimuli at once (e.g., a red-tinted face and a grayscale shoe) and they were asked to attend to the red-tinted stimulus while ignoring the grayscale stimulus. On a subset of trials (ignored repetition trials), partic”
Neural Coding of Cognitive Control: The Representational Similarity Analysis Approach. (2020, neutral): “, [3,146] Unconstrained: [60,147]; constrained: e.”
From brain maps to cognitive ontologies: informatics and the search for mental structure (2015, background): “…literature over whether performance on tasks requiring suppression of a prepotent or ongoing response in favor of a different response requires an active inhibitory process or whether it instead can rely solely on competitive inhibition within a network (Munakata et al. 2011, Aron et al. 2004).”
eview hat is that little voice inside my head ? Inner speech henomenology , its role in cognitive performance , and ts relation to self-monitoring (2014, positive): “The ‘gateway hypothesis’ of rostral prefrontal cortex developed by Burgess and colleagues ([128]; see also [129]) offers a way into addressing this issue.”
The neuroscience of conceptual learning in science and mathematics (2016, background): “However, the control of knowledge within neural networks is embedded within particular domains of knowledge [33,37].”
The role of prefrontal cortex in cognitive control and executive function (2021, background): “To the extent that keeping goals highly active and proactively biasing ongoing processing influences stopping, performance may be more determined by these global processes rather than inhibitionspecific ones [29, 97, 169].”
Executive Functions (2012, neutral): “Representation of one’s goal can be more or less robust in WM; when it is weak or fuzzy, one’s prepotent behavioral inclination might win out in competition with it (e.g., Munakata et al. 2011).”
The Nature and Organization of Individual Differences in Executive Functions: Four General Conclusions (2012, neutral): “This basic ability is necessary for all three EFs and has also been suggested as a key requirement of response inhibition (Munakata et al., 2011).”
The Hierarchical Organisation of Cortical and Basal-Ganglia Systems: A Computationally-Informed Review and Integrated Hypothesis (2013, positive): “…the sensorimotor-mappings of the dorsal pathways affording and implementing actions, and their control by the ventral-pathway/prefrontal cortex, but rarely tackles the issue of the specific mechanisms that the brain used to select alternative affordances and actions (e.g., Munakata et al., 2011).”
Cortical Oscillatory Activity and Motor Control in Pediatric Stroke Patients With Hemidystonia (2025, unknown): “Other studies have implicated the medial frontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and supplementary motor areas in movement selection and initiation during inhibitory control processes (Munakata et al. 2011; Obeso et al. 2013; Velanova et al. 2008).”