Temporally-precise disruption of prefrontal cortex informed by the timing of beta bursts impairs human action-stopping.

ABSTRACT: Human action-stopping is thought to rely on a prefronto-basal ganglia-thalamocortical network, with right inferior frontal cortex (rIFC) posited to play a critical role in the early stage of implementation. Here we sought causal evidence for this idea in experiments involving healthy human participants. We first show that action-stopping is preceded by bursts of electroencephalographic activity in the beta band over prefrontal electrodes, putatively rIFC, and that the timing of these bursts correlates with the latency of stopping at a single-trial level: earlier bursts are associated with faster stopping. From this we reasoned that the integrity of rIFC at the time of beta bursts might be critical to successful stopping. We then used fMRI-guided transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to d

SUBMITTER: Hannah R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7736218 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature