An excitatory-inhibitory fronto-cerebellar loop resolves the Stroop effect

Abstract

The Stroop effect is a well-known behavioral phenomenon in humans that refers to robust interference between language and color information. Although this effect has long been studied, it remains unclear when the interference occurs and how it is resolved in the brain. By manipulating the verbality of stimulus perception and response generation, here we show that the Stroop effect occurs during perception of color-word stimuli and is resolved by a cross-hemispheric, excitatory-inhibitory functional loop involving the lateral prefrontal cortex and cerebellum. Humans performed a Stroop task and a control task in which the stimulus did not contain verbal information, and made a response either vocally or manually. The resolution of Stroop interference involved the lateral prefrontal cortex in the left hemisphere and the cerebellum in the right hemisphere, independently of whether the response was made vocally or manually. In contrast, such cross-hemispheric lateralization was absent during the non-verbal control task. Moreover, the prefrontal cortex amplified cerebellar activity, whereas the cerebellum suppressed prefrontal activity, and these effects were enhanced during interference resolution. These results suggest that this fronto-cerebellar loop involving language and cognitive systems regulates goal-relevant information to resolve the interference occurring during simultaneous perception of a word and color.