Abstract
Response inhibition—the suppression of prepotent motor responses—typically triggers a cascade of behavioral changes in decision making and motor planning which effectively reduces the efficiency of subsequent performance. These effects have traditionally been hypothesized to arise from high-level cognitive processes localized to the frontoparietal cortices. However, recent evidence noting bidirectional interference between top-down processing and perception (Teng & Kravitz, 2019) suggests that post-inhibition interference might also arise from perceptual processing and extend to even task-irrelevant stimulus features; arguing against traditional views that such interference originates in the frontoparietal network. To test this prediction, a simple go/no-go paradigm with colored and oriented Gabor patches was presented to participants recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk. On each trial, participants responded to either the color (Experiment 1) or orientation (Experiment 2) of a Gabor patch while the other, task-irrelevant feature was orthogonal to task goals. Critically, the task-irrelevant feature (of orientation or color) on the go-trial (probe) immediately following the singular no-go trial was manipulated between participants such that it was either 0º or 72º away from that of the preceding inhibition event. Accuracy and response time on the probe trial was worse/slower when the task-irrelevant features of the probe matched (0º) the task-irrelevant feature of preceding inhibition trial than when it differed (72º). Additional experiments replicated this finding and extended it to intermediate task-irrelevant differences (18º, 36º, 54º), allowing for direct comparisons with the known tuning properties of the task-irrelevant feature (of orientation or color) in early perceptual areas. Taken together, these findings suggest that task-irrelevant stimulus features shape post-inhibition performance deficits. Importantly, these results lend support to an alternative theoretical model in which there is extensive interplay between response inhibition and perceptual processing.