Premium
It's not too late: The onset of the frontocentral P 3 indexes successful response inhibition in the stop‐signal paradigm
Author(s) -
Wessel Jan R.,
Aron Adam R.
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
psychophysiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.661
H-Index - 156
eISSN - 1469-8986
pISSN - 0048-5772
DOI - 10.1111/psyp.12374
Subject(s) - psychology , response inhibition , neuroscience , electroencephalography , developmental psychology , communication , cognition
Abstract The frontocentral P 3 event‐related potential has been proposed as a neural marker of response inhibition. However, this association is disputed: some argue that P 3 latency is too late relative to the timing of action stopping (stop‐signal reaction time; SSRT ) to index response inhibition. We tested whether P 3 onset latency is a marker of response inhibition, and whether it coincides with the timing predicted by neurocomputational models. We measured EEG in 62 participants during the stop‐signal task, and used independent component analysis and permutation statistics to measure the P 3 onset in each participant. We show that P 3 onset latency is shorter when stopping is successful, that it is highly correlated with SSRT , and that it coincides with the purported timing of the inhibition process (towards the end of SSRT ). These results demonstrate the utility of P 3 onset latency as a noninvasive, temporally precise neural marker of the response inhibition process.