Here pre-SMA and SMA have been found to maintain separate projections with two subcortical regions that have frequently selleck compound been associated with response inhibition: the STN and striatum (Inase et al., 1999). The frontosubthalamic and frontostriatal pathways are thought to mediate ‘hyperdirect/reactive’ and ‘indirect/proactive’ modes of inhibition respectively. Evidence from intracellular recordings suggests that the convergence of these pathways in the basal ganglia may

explain their complementary functionality. When STN and globus pallidus neurons are activated in response to cortical or corticofugal stimulation, they are subsequently inhibited via activation of the slower frontostriatal projection (Smith, Beyan, Shink, & Bolam, 1998). Although the microcircuitry of the basal ganglia is highly complex and still not fully understood, this feedback mechanism might facilitate the process of halting an action in order to then initiate an alternative response, and provides a possible explanation for the existence of separate cortico-subcortical inhibitory pathways. In humans, changes in motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) recorded during performance of response inhibition tasks have been used to explore how differences in task requirements can affect the rest of the motor system. In a simple STOP-signal task that required only a left or right thumb press in response to the direction of a go

signal, suppression of motor activity in successful STOP trials was observed bilaterally Everolimus clinical trial in both hand and leg muscles up to 400 msec after the stimulus was presented ( Badry et al., 2009). Thus this result appears to exemplify global inhibition. In a separate experiment where participants were cued as to which Erastin hand movement they were likely to have to inhibit, preparatory suppression was observed more specifically, occurring

only in the cued effector muscles ( Claffey, Sheldon, Stinear, Verbruggen, & Aron, 2010). These findings suggest that inhibition can be applied globally or in a selective fashion depending on the behavioural context. They may therefore reflect the difference between deployment of reactive vs. proactive inhibition. If there are different mechanisms for inhibition, how could this explain the findings reported here in our patient? Consider a situation where reactive inhibition is initiated by SMA and proactive inhibition by pre-SMA. First, following a lesion of the pre-SMA region mediating proactive inhibition, performance of the STOP task would remain intact if reactive stopping were mediated by SMA. Paradoxically, response times might even improve, as it would minimize involvement of the slower, frontostriatal selective stopping mechanisms. Second, in a situation where there is a selective deficit in proactive inhibition, performance of the CHANGE task would now have to rely on the reactive inhibitory mechanisms.