Temporal preparation, response inhibition and impulsivity Ángel Correa a, * , Mónica Triviño b , Carolina Pérez-Dueñas a , Alberto Acosta a , Juan Lupiáñez a a Departamento de Psicología Experimental y Fisiología del Comportamiento, Universidad de Granada, Spain b Servicio de Neuropsicología, Hospital Universitario San Rafael, Granada, Spain article info Article history: Accepted 22 May 2010 Available online 20 June 2010 Keywords: Attention Temporal orienting Sequential effects Go no-go task Time perception Cueing Trait impulsivity abstract Temporal preparation and impulsivity involve overlapping neural structures (prefrontal cortex) and cog- nitive functions (response inhibition and time perception), however, their interrelations had not been investigated. We studied such interrelations by comparing the performance of groups with low vs. high non-clinical trait impulsivity during a temporal preparation go no-go task. This task measured, in less than 10 min, how response inhibition was influenced both by temporal orienting of attention (guided by predictive temporal cues) and by sequential effects (produced by repetition/alternation of the duration of preparatory intervals in consecutive trials). The results showed that sequential effects produced disso- ciable patterns of temporal preparation as a function of impulsivity. Sequential effects facilitated both response speed (reaction times – RTs – to the go condition) and response inhibition (false alarms to the no-go condition) selectively in the low impulsivity group. In the high impulsivity group, in contrast, sequential effects only improved RTs but not response inhibition. We concluded that both excitatory and inhibitory processing may be enhanced concurrently by sequential effects, which enables the temporal preparation of fast and controlled responses. Impulsivity could hence be related to less efficient temporal preparation of that inhibitory processing. Ó 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Regular changes in the environment afford the anticipation and preparation of efficient behavioural responses to forthcoming events. Response preparation is a transient process, which requires several tens of milliseconds to develop and decays shortly after reaching a maximum (Bertelson, 1967). However, the time course of the optimal state of preparation can be flexibly adjusted to coin- cide with the moment at which a task-relevant event (target) is ex- pected to occur. This adjustment is generally called ‘‘temporal preparation” and its consequences are revealed by improvements in task performance. Temporal preparation can be controlled voluntarily, ‘‘temporal orienting of attention” (Coull & Nobre, 1998), if individuals are pro- vided with explicit and predictive temporal information about when a target is going to appear after a preparatory interval (e.g., early: after 400 ms, or late: after 1400 ms; see Correa (2010), for a review). Temporal preparation can also be driven by previous experiences of response preparation (Los & Van den Heuvel, 2001), which is known as ‘‘sequential effects”. For example, re- sponse preparation for a target appearing after a short (400 ms) preparatory interval is stronger when that interval involves a rep- etition of a previous short interval rather than a switch from a pre- vious long (1400 ms) interval, even when the sequence of short and long preparatory intervals is completely unpredictable (Wood- row, 1914). These two mechanisms of temporal preparation have been dis- sociated in both behavioural and electrophysiological research (Correa, Lupiáñez, Milliken, & Tudela, 2004; Los & Heslenfeld, 2005). In a recent neuropsychological study we have reported a selective impairment in temporal orienting but not in sequential effects as a consequence of lesions in the right prefrontal cortex (Triviño, Correa, Arnedo, & Lupiáñez, 2010). The involvement of the prefrontal cortex is important here because clinical and non- clinical impulsive individuals show anatomical and physiological differences as compared to control participants in this brain area (see Brennan and Arnsten (2008), for a review; Matsuo et al., 2009). Impulsivity is a personality trait that has been defined as ‘‘a pre- disposition toward rapid, unplanned reactions to internal or exter- nal stimuli without regard to the negative consequences of these reactions to the impulsive individuals or to others” (Moeller, Barr- att, Dougherty, Schmitz, & Swann, 2001). In experimental contexts of clinical impulsivity (e.g., attention deficit and hyperactivity dis- order, ADHD), impulsivity can be operationalised in terms of a behavioural deficit in response inhibition tasks (Casey et al., 1997). Thus, the common role of the prefrontal cortex in both 0278-2626/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.bandc.2010.05.006 * Corresponding author. Present address: Departamento de Psicología Experi- mental y Fisiología del Comportamiento, Facultad de Psicología, Campus Univer- sitario de Cartuja s/n, 18071 Granada, Spain. Fax: +34 958 246239. E-mail address: act@ugr.es (Á. Correa). URL: http://www.ugr.es/~act/ (Á. Correa). Brain and Cognition 73 (2010) 222–228 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Brain and Cognition journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/b&c