The frontal lobes have long been implicated in inhibitory control, but a full understanding of the underlying mechanisms remains elusive. The stop-signal task has been widely used to probe instructed response inhibition in cognitive neuroscience. The processes involved have been modeled and related to putative brain substrates. However, there has been surprisingly little human lesion research using this task, with the few existing studies implicating different prefrontal regions. Here, we tested the effects of focal prefrontal damage on stop-signal task performance in a large sample of people with chronic focal damage affecting the frontal lobes (n = 42) and demographically matched healthy people (n = 60). Patients with damage to the left lateral, right lateral, dorsomedial, or ventromedial frontal lobe had slower stop-signal RT compared to healthy controls. There were systematic differences in the patterns of impairment across frontal subgroups: Those with damage to the left or right lateral and dorsomedial frontal lobes, but not those with ventromedial frontal damage, were slower than controls to “go” as well as to stop. These findings suggest that multiple prefrontal regions make necessary but distinct contributions to stop-signal task performance. As a consequence, stop-signal RT slowing is not strongly localizing within the frontal lobes.

长期以来，额叶与抑制控制有关，但对潜在机制的全面了解仍然难以捉摸。停止信号任务已被广泛用于探索认知神经科学中的指令性反应抑制。所涉及的过程已被建模并与假定的大脑基质相关。然而，令人惊讶的是，使用这项任务的人类病变研究很少，现有的研究很少涉及不同的前额叶区域。在这里，我们在大量患有影响额叶的慢性局灶性损伤的人 ( n = 42) 和人口统计学匹配的健康人 ( n ) 中测试了局灶性前额叶损伤对停止信号任务表现的影响。= 60）。与健康对照相比，左侧、右侧、背内侧或腹内侧额叶受损的患者具有较慢的停止信号放疗。额叶亚组的损伤模式存在系统性差异：左侧或右侧额叶外侧和背内侧额叶受损的患者，而不是腹内侧额叶损伤的患者，“走”和“停”的速度比对照组慢。这些发现表明，多个前额叶区域对停止信号任务的表现做出了必要但不同的贡献。因此，停止信号 RT 减慢并没有强烈地定位在额叶内。