Visual salience of the stop signal affects the neuronal dynamics of controlled inhibition

The voluntary control of movement is often tested by using the countermanding, or stop-signal task that sporadically requires the suppression of a movement in response to an incoming stop-signal. Neurophysiological recordings in monkeys engaged in the countermanding task have shown that dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) is implicated in movement control. An open question is whether and how the perceptual demands inherent the stop-signal affects inhibitory performance and their underlying neuronal correlates. To this aim we recorded multi-unit activity (MUA) from the PMd of two male monkeys performing a countermanding task in which the salience of the stop-signals was modulated. Consistently to what has been observed in humans, we found that less salient stimuli worsened the inhibitory performance. At the neuronal level, these behavioral results were subtended by the following modulations: when the stop-signal was not noticeable compared to the salient condition the preparatory neuronal activity in PMd started to be affected later and with a less sharp dynamic. This neuronal pattern is probably the consequence of a less efficient inhibitory command useful to interrupt the neural dynamic that supports movement generation in PMd.