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Published August 2012 | public
Journal Article

Performance Dip in Motor Response Induced by Task-Irrelevant Weaker Coherent Visual Motion Signals

Abstract

The Performance Dip is a newly characterized behavioral phenomenon, where, paradoxically, a weaker task-irrelevant visual stimulus causes larger disturbances on the accuracy of a main letter identification task than a stronger stimulus does. Understanding mechanisms of the Performance Dip may provide insight into unconsciousness behavior. Here, we investigated the generalization of the Performance Dip. Specifically, we tested whether the Performance Dip occurs in a motion-related Simon task, and if so, whether the Performance Dip involves the same brain region, that is, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), previously implicated in the Performance Dip, or the supplementary motor area (SMA) and pre-SMA, implicated in a motion-related Simon Task. Subjects made manual directional responses according to the color of stochastic moving dots while ignoring the global direction of moving dots, which could be either congruent or incongruent to the response appropriate to the main task. We found that weak incongruent task-irrelevant stimuli caused a Performance Dip, in which the SMA and pre-SMA, rather than DLPFC, played critical roles. Our results suggest a possible common brain mechanism across different neural circuits, in which weak, but not strong, task-irrelevant information is free from inhibition and intrudes into neural circuits relevant to the main task.

Additional Information

© 2011 The Author. Published by Oxford University Press. Advance Access publication September 21, 2011. We would also like to thank Theresa Cook, Eric Chen, Dan Welch, and Jonathan Dobres for their helpful comments on the manuscript. Conflict of Interest : None declared. Funding: National Institutes of Health (NIH, R01EY015980, EY019466, AG031941, MH091801); the National Science Foundation (BCS- 0345746, BCS-0549036, BSC-0946776); the Human Frontier Foundation (RGP 18/2004); the NIH National Center for Research Resources (P41RR14075, S10RR021110); grants-inaid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI-22830081, 23680028); the Mental Illness and Neuroscience Discovery Institute; Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging; Massachusetts General Hospital; The ministry of education, culture, sports, science and technology, Japan (MEXT) (Tamagawa global COE program, Grant-in-aid for Scientific Research (A), Grant-in-aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas); Japan Science and Technology Agency (CREST); and the ERATO Shimojo Implicit Brain Function Project for their support on this project.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
March 5, 2024