Dynamic Neural Deactivation Bridges Direct and Competitive Inhibition Processes

Inhibition is an important concept in cognitive neuroscience. Direct inhibition, characterized by the active suppression of stimuli, and competition-induced inhibition, which involves ignoring irrelevant stimuli by prioritizing relevant ones, have traditionally been considered distinct and studied separately. Although their spatial neural overlap has been highlighted, the temporal dimension-the development of neural activities over time-remains largely unexplored. Using multimodal neuroimaging and behavioral experiments in the auditory and visual domains, in addition to conjunction analyses that capture their neural commonalities, we observed that both inhibition types exhibit a shared deactivation temporal dynamic. It is characterized by a progressive reduction in frontoparietal activation and increased deactivation in sensory regions, a pattern that is positively correlated with improved inhibition performance and whose causal disruption contributes to reduced inhibitory effect. Furthermore, this deactivation-dominant pattern is consistent across different sensory modalities and generalizes to various low-processing demand scenarios, whether actively induced or passively experienced. In addition, functional blurring in information clarity during inhibition is found. Overall, the findings reveal that diverse inhibitory processes for modulating information input converge on a shared neural substrate characterized by dynamic feedforward signal attenuation, thereby bridging previously disconnected domains of inhibition research and offering new perspectives of neural deactivation.