A critical component that activates the left inferior prefrontal cortex during interference resolution

Previous studies of proactive interference (PI) have revealed the involvement of the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) in resolution of PI during working memory/item recognition. PI resolution is thought to require: (1) inhibition of inappropriate attribution of familiarity to the probe and resultant inappropriate response tendencies; and (2) inhibition of PI per se regardless of the appropriateness of the attribution of familiarity. It is not clear, however, whether the IFG supports inhibition of inappropriate response tendencies or inhibition of PI per se. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we dissociate these possibilities using a recency judgment paradigm. Recency judgments, judgments of the relative temporal order of two studied items, provided an opportunity of examining three types of trials that differed in the way PI influenced the current trials: the trials where PI from previous trials was congruent with the current trials (C‐PI trials); the trials where PI was incongruent with the current trials (I‐PI trials); and the trials where no PI influenced the current trials (N‐PI trials). Relative to the N‐PI trials, the I‐PI trials elicited the significant left IFG activation associated with PI resolution, consistent with previous studies using working memory/item recognition. We found that the IFG activation was related not to inhibition of inappropriate response tendencies (I‐PI vs. C‐PI), but to inhibition of PI per se (C‐PI vs. N‐PI). These results indicate that the left IFG plays its control role regardless of whether or not PI is congruent with correct performance of current trials.

[1]  B. Underwood.  Interference and forgetting. , 1957, Psychological review.

[2]  B. Milner,et al.  Interhemispheric differences in the localization of psychological processes in man. , 1971, British medical bulletin.

[3]  S. Monsell.  Recency, immediate recognition memory, and reaction time , 1978, Cognitive Psychology.

[4]  J. G. Snodgrass,et al.  A standardized set of 260 pictures: norms for name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity. , 1980, Journal of experimental psychology. Human learning and memory.

[5]  Colin M. Macleod.  Half a century of research on the Stroop effect: an integrative review. , 1991, Psychological bulletin.

[6]  M. Petrides.  Functional specialization within the dorsolateral frontal cortex for serial order memory , 1991, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences.

[7]  Karl J. Friston,et al.  Analysis of fMRI Time-Series Revisited , 1995, NeuroImage.

[8]  Arthur P. Shimamura,et al.  Memory and frontal lobe function. , 1995 .

[9]  Jonathan D. Cohen,et al.  Interference and Facilitation Effects during Selective Attention: An H2 15O PET Study of Stroop Task Performance , 1995, NeuroImage.

[10]  Karl J. Friston,et al.  Analysis of fMRI Time-Series Revisited—Again , 1995, NeuroImage.

[11]  E Zarahn,et al.  Activation of the prefrontal cortex during judgments of recency: a functional MRI study. , 1996, Neuroreport.

[12]  Michael C. Anderson,et al.  Interference and inhibition in memory retrieval. , 1996 .

[13]  Lars Nyberg,et al.  Brain Regions Differentially Involved in Remembering What and When: a PET Study , 1997, Neuron.

[14]  Indira Tendolkar,et al.  Electrophysiological dissociation of recency and recognition memory , 1998, Neuropsychologia.

[15]  J. Jonides,et al.  Inhibition in verbal working memory revealed by brain activation. , 1998, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[16]  E E Smith,et al.  The neural substrate and temporal dynamics of interference effects in working memory as revealed by event-related functional MRI. , 1999, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[17]  Y. Miyashita,et al.  Common inhibitory mechanism in human inferior prefrontal cortex revealed by event-related functional MRI. , 1999, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[18]  E. Stein,et al.  Right hemispheric dominance of inhibitory control: an event-related functional MRI study. , 1999, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[19]  Lars Nyberg,et al.  Age-Related Differences in Neural Activity during Item and Temporal-Order Memory Retrieval: A Positron Emission Tomography Study , 2000, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[20]  S. Petersen,et al.  Characterizing the Hemodynamic Response: Effects of Presentation Rate, Sampling Procedure, and the Possibility of Ordering Brain Activity Based on Relative Timing , 2000, NeuroImage.

[21]  J. Ridley.  Studies of Interference in Serial Verbal Reactions , 2001 .

[22]  E. Bullmore,et al.  Mapping Motor Inhibition: Conjunctive Brain Activations across Different Versions of Go/No-Go and Stop Tasks , 2001, NeuroImage.

[23]  Robert T. Knight,et al.  Effects of frontal lobe damage on interference effects in working memory , 2002, Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience.

[24]  Michael C. Anderson,et al.  Inhibitory processes and the control of memory retrieval , 2002, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[25]  Yasushi Miyashita,et al.  Neural Correlates of Recency Judgment , 2002, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[26]  Anthony D Wagner,et al.  Executive Control during Episodic Retrieval Multiple Prefrontal Processes Subserve Source Memory , 2002, Neuron.

[27]  Takashi Tsukiura,et al.  Neural Basis of Temporal Context Memory: A Functional MRI Study , 2001, NeuroImage.

[28]  R. J. Dolan,et al.  Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Proactive Interference during Spoken Cued Recall , 2002, NeuroImage.

[29]  M. Petrides,et al.  Differential activation of the human orbital, mid-ventrolateral, and mid-dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during the processing of visual stimuli , 2002, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[30]  B. J. Casey,et al.  The Effect of Preceding Context on Inhibition: An Event-Related fMRI Study , 2002, NeuroImage.

[31]  N. Cohen,et al.  Attentional Control in the Aging Brain: Insights from an fMRI Study of the Stroop Task , 2002, Brain and Cognition.

[32]  J. Gabrieli,et al.  Immature Frontal Lobe Contributions to Cognitive Control in Children Evidence from fMRI , 2002, Neuron.

[33]  Tim Curran,et al.  Differentiating location- and distance-based processes in memory for time: An ERP study , 2003, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[34]  T C Gunter,et al.  Dissociable brain mechanisms for inhibitory control: effects of interference content and working memory capacity. , 2003, Brain research. Cognitive brain research.

[35]  Anthony D Wagner,et al.  Memory orientation and success: separable neurocognitive components underlying episodic recognition , 2003, Neuropsychologia.

[36]  John Jonides,et al.  Dissociable neural mechanisms underlying response-based and familiarity-based conflict in working memory , 2003, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[37]  Paul J. Laurienti,et al.  An automated method for neuroanatomic and cytoarchitectonic atlas-based interrogation of fMRI data sets , 2003, NeuroImage.

[38]  John J. Foxe,et al.  Prefrontal‐subcortical dissociations underlying inhibitory control revealed by event‐related fMRI , 2004, The European journal of neuroscience.

[39]  Hoi-Chung Leung,et al.  Interference resolution in spatial working memory , 2004, NeuroImage.

[40]  David Badre,et al.  Frontal lobe mechanisms that resolve proactive interference. , 2005, Cerebral cortex.

[41]  M. Milham,et al.  Anterior cingulate cortex: An fMRI analysis of conflict specificity and functional differentiation , 2005, Human brain mapping.

[42]  A. R. McIntosh,et al.  Dissociating prefrontal contributions during a recency memory task , 2006, Neuropsychologia.

[43]  Koji Jimura,et al.  Activation shift from medial to lateral temporal cortex associated with recency judgements following impoverished encoding. , 2006, Cerebral cortex.

[44]  J. Jonides,et al.  Brain mechanisms of proactive interference in working memory , 2006, Neuroscience.

[45]  R. Constable,et al.  Imaging Response Inhibition in a Stop-Signal Task: Neural Correlates Independent of Signal Monitoring and Post-Response Processing , 2006, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[46]  Giulio Tononi,et al.  Direct evidence for a prefrontal contribution to the control of proactive interference in verbal working memory , 2006, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[47]  Daniel L. Schacter,et al.  Prefrontal Activity and Diagnostic Monitoring of Memory Retrieval: fMRI of the Criterial Recollection Task , 2006, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[48]  R. Poldrack,et al.  Cortical and Subcortical Contributions to Stop Signal Response Inhibition: Role of the Subthalamic Nucleus , 2006, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[49]  Jeremy B Caplan,et al.  Two distinct functional networks for successful resolution of proactive interference. , 2007, Cerebral cortex.

[50]  Nicole M. Dudukovic,et al.  Goal-dependent modulation of declarative memory: Neural correlates of temporal recency decisions and novelty detection , 2007, Neuropsychologia.

[51]  Koji Jimura,et al.  Activation of Right Inferior Frontal Gyrus during Response Inhibition across Response Modalities , 2007, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[52]  Marc G. Berman,et al.  Neural mechanisms of proactive interference-resolution , 2007, NeuroImage.

[53]  David Badre,et al.  Left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and the cognitive control of memory , 2007, Neuropsychologia.

[54]  H. Leung,et al.  Common and Differential Ventrolateral Prefrontal Activity during Inhibition of Hand and Eye Movements , 2007, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[55]  M. Natasha Rajah,et al.  Prefrontal contributions to domain-general executive control processes during temporal context retrieval , 2008, Neuropsychologia.

[56]  Roberto Cabeza,et al.  The Short and Long of It: Neural Correlates of Temporal-order Memory for Autobiographical Events , 2008, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[57]  Richard L. Lewis,et al.  The mind and brain of short-term memory. , 2008, Annual review of psychology.

[58]  Anthony R. McIntosh,et al.  Age-related differences in brain activity during verbal recency memory , 2008, Brain Research.

[59]  Koji Jimura,et al.  On Verbal/Nonverbal Modality Dependence of Left and Right Inferior Prefrontal Activation during Performance of Flanker Interference Task , 2008, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.