Jan R. Wessel

It’s out!

Yeah I was actually thinking of the Forum format when I started writing. But then it became ~3500 words, 80-100 (?) references and a figure (that took me more time than the writing)...
I don't know if that's still appropriate or doable in the forum format

Yes, that is another very good point.
SSRT itself has major issues in general, but that's another paper for another day entirely ;)

Birte Forstmann has already done some stuff in the latter regard, as usual. See recent Sebastian et al. paper with Birte and Dora cited in my paper. Sebastian work is always very good and Birte F. work is obviously always at the absolute cutting edge. I imagine they're already working on something.

I don't know much about fNIRS but doesn't it also measure hemodynamic activity? Probably subject to same temporal smearing if so.
I make some suggestions in the paper. EEG decoding or Huster's EMG approach paired with fMRI would be good. Or better comp/behav models of stopping a la Matzke perhaps.

Would have been nice to get some feedback and criticism from the people who do this work. But alas.

(Needless to say I'm done reviewing for those jokesters.)

I don't know what to do with this, it's probably gonna just be a forever-preprint. I submitted it to @imagingneurosci.bsky.social, but since one of the SEVEN reviewers I proposed (including everyone whose work I use to illustrate the shortcomings) said that they have a COI, they desk-rejected it.

Read if you're curious why 25+ years after some of the most-cited work in cogneuro history, fundamental Qs still remain unresolved, why new fMRI work often produces seemingly confusing results, or why contrasts that are vital to understand response inhibition are almost never found in fMRI research.

I reviewed 5+ fMRI papers on response inhibition within roughly the last year, and the same points come up over and over again. So I wrote a short note last week entitled "The unique limitations of BOLD-fMRI in the study of response inhibition". You can read it here.
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Trying to bring myself up-to-date on beta burst mechanisms and methods and I don't even have enough time catch up with all that @danclab.bsky.social alone have been doing...

The Frohlich brain stim stuff is always so sick dude

I am looking to hire 2-3 post-docs over the course of the next few months to work on questions related to cognitive control in humans, broadly construed. EEG, TMS, DBS, sEEG, fMRI or related methodological experience preferred.
Apply here:

jobs.uiowa.edu/jobSearch/po...

Lab website: wessellab.org

NIH scraps policy that classified basic research in people as clinical trials The policy aimed to increase the transparency of research in humans but created “a bureaucratic nightmare” for basic neuroscientists.

Although the reporting requirements are over for basic experimental studies in humans, the principle of making research plans and results public and accessible is “a good one that we should all continue to work on,” Jeremy Wolfe says.

By @callimcflurry.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

bit.ly/4kpaBCC

If you know anyone that has made a similar experience and is willing to talk on the record to a reporter about this, please get in touch. Thanks :)

Extended post-doc offers to two people recently.
Both had their visas denied, so now those positions remain unfilled.

This is good for America somehow.

"We folks" are heartbroken.
We're missing out on impeccable inferences like "if a paper gets cited that means that the task therein is used in cutting-edge research in one specific field."

I don't know what your problem is as far as the tone of these replies goes, but one of your problems seems to be that you think that there is only one type of 'validity' and its 'external validity'. That, frankly, is not my problem.

"Response inhibition" and "inhibitory control" aren't synonyms to me, but it's helpful to know that they are to you.

- What do you mean by "inhibitory control"?
- The idea that a lab task can ever be more than mildly predictive of real-world behavior is silly.
- All lab tasks are bad. But necessary to study basic neural circuits.
- No respected basic cogneuro "inhibitory control" lab uses the tasks you listed.

But I'll let you dig into the paper if you're interested. Here's the preprint again: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

There is much more in the paper, including multi-variate decoding analyses of the EEG, EMG, and a lateralization analysis of STN. That latter analysis shows that β bursts in the bilateral STN are extremely tightly coupled, and there is little evidence for lateralized β in STN during stopping.

Moreover, STN beta burst rates were strongly coupled with fronto-central beta burst rates during all trials. This suggests that the fronto-STN circuit flexibly coordinates behavioral adjustments by rapidly inhibiting, releasing, and re-inhibiting movement, depending on the contextual requirements.

So what are these precise adjustments? On global stop-trials, STN β burst rates kept rising above baseline levels after the initial increase, sustaining there for over a second. On selective stop & ignore trials, where some (or all) movement had to continue, STN β bursts first went DOWN again.

On the Globality of Motor Suppression: Unexpected Events and Their Influence on Behavior and Cognition Unexpected events are part of everyday experience. They come in several varieties—action errors, unexpected action outcomes, and unexpected perceptual…

This is in line with our previous work suggesting that hyperdirect STN activity is an automatic and stereotypic response to all salient stimuli. It's a "Pause" that buys time for more precise adjustments of behavior. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

There's a bunch of findings in the paper, and I won't go over all of them. Most notably, STN initially showed the same fast β burst increase across 'global' stop trials (all movements are stopped), response-selective stop trials (only some movements are stopped), and even ignore trials (no stopping)

Precisely-timed outpatient recordings of subcortical local field potentials from wireless streaming-capable deep-brain stimulators: a method and toolbox Investigations of the electrophysiological mechanisms of the human subcortex have relied on recording local field potentials (LFPs) during deep-brain …

Cheol and Mario then used a method that they developed to record LFPs from the human STN outside of surgery, using the telemetry interface of Percept deep-brain stimulators. This also allowed them to record EEG at the same time. Find their methods paper here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

So Mario made a stimulus- and response- selective task, where only some signals meant "stop", whereas others had to be ignored. Moreover, sometimes only some movements had to stop, while others had to continue.

Second, unlike the SST, real-world stopping is 'response-selective': most often, only some movements are stopped, while others continue. In other words, you can stop walking across the road without dropping your grocery bag. In the SST, you stop all initiated movements.

First, unlike the stop-signal task (SST), real-world stopping is 'stimulus-selective': movements are stopped only to some salient stimuli - unlike in the SST, where every salient signal means 'stop'. Picture crossing this road: you only stop walking after a car horn, but not a ship's air horn.

However, this work has so far been limited to very simple stop-signal tasks. That is because human STN recordings have to be performed during neurosurgery, where cognition and behavior are substantially impaired.
Stop-signal tasks, however, are a poor model of real-world control.