The neural mechanism underpinning balance calibration between action inhibition and activation initiated by reward motivation

In everyday life, it is often the case that in some situations we are motivated and want not only to speed up our actions but also to avoid mistakes—for example, ballgames. How our brain works at that moment to resolve the situations and react properly has created an active research field. Previous findings indicated that maintaining a balance between withholding and executing an action are highly dynamic and involve many executive control processes. This fMRI study was set up to investigate how motivation affects these balancing processes. With manipulation of prospective rewards in a stop-signal task where both the proactive and reactive control were equally emphasized, our behavioral results replicated previous findings. The fMRI findings backed up the behavioral results. We found motivation effects in the anterior caudate and pre-SMA for action inhibition. The former works to register motivation status, the latter works to transform motivation into action inhibition control. Together with the results of connectivity analysis, our study also suggests a hierarchical relationship between functional roles of pre-SMA and right inferior frontal gyrus during action inhibition. While the pre-SMA acts to accommodate higher-order factors, such as motivation, for action control, the right inferior frontal cortex acts to participate in the execution of action inhibition. This study pinned down a neural mechanism that integrates reward motivation into action inhibition control.