Investigation of the neural networks underlying inhibition across verbal and visual domains

Inhibition is a central component of executive control as it allows ignoring irrelevant information, the-reby facilitating the focus on relevant ones. The nature of inhibitory control mechanisms remains an open question, and particularly the domain-specificity of these mechanisms.
This fMRI study investigated the neural networks associated with the inhibition of phonological, se-mantic and visual distractors in a target-probe matching task.
37 adult participants (20-40 years old) were placed in an MRI scanner and performed a similarity-judgement task in which they had to judge which item out of two probes was the most similar to two target items. In the facilitation condition, the correct probe item was preactivated via a prime appear-ing briefly before the trial; in the inhibition condition, the prime preactivated the wrong probe item, which then had to be inhibited for correct response selection. We will determine the commonality and differences of univariate neural networks associated with the inhibition condition for the phonological, semantic and visual task modalities. Furthermore, via multivariate voxel pattern analyses, we will examine whether neural patterns distinguishing inhibition vs facilitation in one modality allow to pre-dict the same distinction in another modality. Such cross-modality prediction would be evidence for domain-general inhibitory mechanisms in executive control. Analyses are on-going and preliminary results will be presented.