Phd in PHD PROGRAM IN BEHAVIORAL NEUROSCIENCE

Thesis title: BEHAVIORAL AND NEURAL CORRELATES OF CONTROLLED INHIBITION IN HUMANS AND NON-HUMANS PRIMATES.

Response inhibition is an essential aspect of cognitive control that is necessary for terminating inappropriate preplanned or ongoing responses. Initially the study of the behavioral and neural correlates of action inhibition has been focused mainly on reactive inhibition, that is the ability to suppress an ongoing response upon the presentation of an imperative stimulus. However, the current line of research in the field is unearthing a more complex picture of the mechanism involved in action control, calling into question the role of proactive control, that is the ability to anticipate response inhibition in the absence of an external command.The present work fits the current state of the art on action control by investigating two main issues: In the first study we will provide neural evidence for the alternation of two inhibitory mechanisms (reactive and proactive) accordingly to the strategy subjects adopt to solve a selective-stop task. In the second study, we will show how response preparation affects subjects’ performance in the same task, to explicitly demonstrate how factors usually uncontrolled during the experiments (e.g., the preparatory state before the presentation of imperative stimuli) influence how agents face the task demands.