Action conflict and suppression
As emphasized by William James and later elucidated by Sir Charles Sherrington, inhibition and interference are ubiquitous in the nervous system and play an essential role in voluntary movement. In everyday life, to produce fluid and precise skilled actions, an important process is to resolve conflicting external or internal cues and respond to ongoing changes in the environment. In this line of research, we attempt to tackle the question of how people resolve these conflicts and abort unwanted actions.Our previous research using a selective stop-signal task has shown that with training, people can selectively suppress a subset of multiple ongoing motor plans without interfering with the other components(2014). Our recent studies using motor-STROOP tasks with a forced-RT paradigm further found that recruitment of motor command under conflicting situations may be prone to levels of conflict in different contexts (SFN 2018,NCM 2018).We thus strive to tease apart the underlying motor preparation processes in a conflicting and changing environment.