Sensory Regression Analysis

The ability to anticipate and detect behaviorally salient stimuli in the environment is important for virtually all adaptive behaviors, including tasks involving inhibitory control, which require withholding prepotent responses when instructed by stop signals. While the involvement of right fronto-opercular cortex in inhibitory control is well established, little is known about its dynamic interactions with sensory cortex and how these interactions are modulated by stop-signal expectation. Here we use two independent datasets to investigate the differential roles of right anterior insula (rAI) and right inferior frontal cortex (rIFC), two key subdivisions of right fronto-opercular cortex, in detection and anticipation of inhibitory control. …show more content…
Crucially, a Bayesian prediction model revealed that these interactions changed with subjective levels of trial-by-trial stop-signal anticipation such that the strength of causal influence from rIFC to rAI increased significantly on trials in which participants had higher stop-signal anticipation. Taken together, these results demonstrate the crucial role of rAI in detection of behaviorally salient signals in both auditory and visual modalities and highlight the role of rIFC in top-down modulation of rAI during anticipation of stop signals. Our findings significantly advance knowledge of how the frontal control system interacts with input from primary sensory regions and how these interactions are modulated by subjective changes in expectation over