Three-dimensional tomography of event-related potentials during response inhibition: evidence for phasic frontal lobe activation

Objectives: Spatial analysis of the evoked brain electrical fields during a cued continuous performance test (CPT) revealed an extremely robust anteriorization of the positivity of a P300 microstate in the NoGo compared to the Go condition (NoGo-anteriorization in a previous study). To allow a neuroanatomical interpretation the NoGo-anteriorization was investigated with a new three-dimensional source tomography method (LORETA) was applied. Methods: The CPT contains subsets of stimuli requiring the execution (Go) or the inhibition (NoGo) of a cued motor response which can be considered as mutual control conditions for the event-related potential (ERP) study of inhibitory brain functions 21-channel ERPs were obtained from IO healthy subjects during a cued CPT, and analyzed with LORETA. Results: Topographic analyses revealed significantly different scalp distributions between the Go and the NoGo conditions in both P100 and P300 microstates, indicating that already at an early stage different neural assemblies are activated. LORETA disclosed a significant hyperactivity located in the right frontal lobe during the NoGo condition in the P300 microstate. Conclusions: The results indicate that right frontal sources are responsible for the NoGo-anteriorization of the scalp P300 which is consistent with animal and human lesion studies of inhibitory brain functions. Furthermore, it demonstrates that frontal activation is confined to a brief microstate and lime-locked to phasic inhibitory motor control. This adds important functional and chronometric specificity to findings of frontal activation obtained with PET and Near-Infrared-Spectroscopy studies during the cued CPT, and suggests that these metabolic results are not due to general task demands. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.