Jae-Hwan Kang, Junsuk Kim, Yang Seok Cho and Sung-Phil Kim
“Rock-paper-scissors (RPS) game: scissors cuts paper, paper wraps rock, rock breaks scissors. How does the brain react if it's the other way around?"
The human brain carries out cognitive control for the inhibition of habitual behaviors by suppressing some familiar but inappropriate behaviors instead of engaging specific goal-directed behavior flexibly in a given situation. To examine spatiotemporal characteristics of neural dynamics related to such inhibition of habitual behaviors, we used a modified rock-paper-scissors (RPS) task that consisted of three conditions: a basic, a lose-, and a win-conditioned game. Spectral and phase synchrony analyses were conducted to examine the acquired electroencephalogram signals during all RPS tasks and revealed that a stream of neural processes related to the inhibition of habitual behaviors was reflected in the neural dynamics of frontal theta oscillations. Temporal variations in frontal theta power activities were in line with the stream of RPS procedures, irrespective of task condition. Compared to the win-conditioned RPS task, the lose-conditioned RPS task gave rise to increases in the local frontal power and global phase-synchronized pairs of theta oscillations. Furthermore, the activation of global phase-synchronized network preceded the activation of frontal theta power. Consistent with anatomical and functional evidence from past neuroimaging studies, these results demonstrate that the frontal regions play a pivotal role in the inhibition of habitual behaviors—stereotyped and ingrained stimulus-response mappings that have been established over time. This study suggests that frontal theta oscillations may be engaged during the cognitive inhibition of habitual behaviors in task switching tasks and that these oscillations characterize the degree of cognitive load required to inhibit habitual behaviors.
Jae-Hwan Kang, Junsuk Kim, Yang Seok Cho and Sung-Phil Kim. "Spatiotemporal characteristics of neural dynamics in theta oscillations related to the inhibition of habitual behavior"under review.
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