Medial Frontal Hyperactivation in the Developing Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Brain: An Adaptive Response Rescued by Medication-Related Reduction of Limbic Interference?

The capacity to control emotion and behavior is an important human adaptation. The development of cognitive control strategies is a critical aspect of children's social development and protects against psychopathology. Dysfunctions in inhibitory control play an important role in the development of neurodevelopmental disorders, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and Tourette's disorder. Inhibitory control is not a unitary construct and consists of motor response inhibition (i.e., inhibition of pre-potent and automatic motor responses or cancellation of already triggered responses) and interference control (i.e., ignoring interfering irrelevant stimuli). Cognitive control performance depends on the capacity to inhibit inappropriate responses and to monitor errors to flexibly adjust behavior. Various paradigms have been developed to study inhibition and error processing, and by combining these with functional magnetic resonance imaging, it has been shown that inhibitory control relies on proper function of the cingulo-operculum network (CON), which is strongly connected to the frontoparietal network and striatal regions.