To evaluate such a prospect, it is informative to consider the neural bases of inhibitory control in other domains beside the motoric domain. Research suggests that right lateral prefrontal regions also play a prominent role when the retrieval of

information from episodic memory must be inhibited. Anderson and colleagues [17] devised a mental analog of the Go/No-Go task, called the Think/No-Think task, in which individuals learn associations between cue-target item pairs. In the critical phase of the task, participants are shown just the cue. For some cues, participants are signaled to remember the associated item. For other cues, participants are signaled to www.selleckchem.com/products/dabrafenib-gsk2118436.html inhibit thinking about the associated item. Behavioral results indicate that the more chances an individual has to remember an item associated with a cue, the better the recall compared to items in which no retrieval from memory has been prompted. Likewise, the more chances an individual has to inhibit retrieval, the poorer the recall compared to items in which no retrieval from memory has been prompted. Hence, the Think/No-Think

task focuses on inhibition of retrieval from memory, akin to the inhibition of a motor response in the Go/No-Go task. Neuroimaging work has shown that the right lateral prefrontal cortex plays a prominent role in inhibiting memory retrieval by down-regulating activity in the hippocampus [18••] as well as sensory regions (e.g., ventral visual processing areas) that support the originally encoded memory (e.g., of a visual scene) 18•• and 19•. The region so identified, right middle frontal gyrus (rMFG), is a bit more superior to that identified Trametinib mouse in motor inhibition. Similarly, when individuals are directed to encode and then forget certain items or lists in the directed forgetting paradigm, right hemisphere

regions, including lateral prefrontal cortex, become more active (e.g., 20 and 21 and see [22] for review of neural mechanisms involving inhibitory effects on memory including those at encoding). The rMFG is implicated as being especially important based on a number of findings. For example, activation of rMFG predicts the degree to which individuals are successful at inhibition of memory retrieval, and those individuals with a more negative correlation between activation of the rMFG and the hippocampus are better at suppressing Bumetanide memory retrieval [18••]. In addition, although young adults with ADHD are no worse at retrieving memories (i.e., have equivalent performance on Think trials), they have a specific deficit in the inhibition of memory (i.e., have a poorer ability to inhibit retrieval on No Think trials) (Figure 3a). Importantly, the only brain region in which they show reduced activity as measured by fMRI compared to controls on No-Think trials is the rMFG [23] (Figure 3b), implicating this region as playing a central role in inhibiting memory retrieval.