Greater Disruption Due to Failure of Inhibitory Control on an Ambiguous Distractor
Abstract
Considerable evidence indicates that a stimulus that is subthreshold, and thus consciously invisible, influences brain activity and behavioral performance. However, it is not clear how subthreshold stimuli are processed in the brain. We found that a task-irrelevant subthreshold coherent motion led to a stronger disturbance in task performance than did suprathreshold motion. With the subthreshold motion, activity in the visual cortex measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging was higher, but activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex was lower, than with suprathreshold motion. These results suggest that subthreshold irrelevant signals are not subject to effective inhibitory control.
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This study is funded by grants from NIH (R01 EY015980 and R21 EY017737), NSF (BCS-0345746, BCS-0549036, and BCS-PR04-137 Center of Excellence for Learning in Education, Science, and Technology), and the Human Frontier Science Program Organization (RGP18/2004) to T.W., and by grants from National Center for Research Resources (P41RR14075), the Mental Illness and Neuroscience Discovery Institute, the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, and the ERATO Shimojo Implicit Brain Function project to Y.S. We thank P. Cavanagh, Y. Kamitani, M. Kawato, I. Motoyoshi, J. Nanez, M. Sakagami, S. Shimojo, and the members of Vision Sciences Laboratory at Boston University for their comments on the study and N. Ito and Y. Yotsumoto for technical assistance.
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Volume 314 | Issue 5806
15 December 2006
15 December 2006
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American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Received: 31 July 2006
Accepted: 20 October 2006
Published in print: 15 December 2006
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