Neural Mechanisms of Impulse Control: The Role of Prefrontal–Basal Ganglia Networks

Impulse control encompasses processes that allow individuals to regulate behaviour in accordance with current goals and anticipated consequences. Response inhibition—the ability to cancel or suppress an initiated or prepotent action—is one component of this broader capacity. Research has implicated interactions among the right inferior frontal cortex (rIFC), the presupplementary motor area (preSMA), and the basal ganglia, particularly the subthalamic nucleus (STN), in response inhibition. However, the interpretation of these findings remains contested: activity in a particular region may reflect a specialised contribution to stopping, a broader role in attentional or cognitive control, or participation in a distributed network. This narrative review considers evidence from neuroimaging, lesion studies, intracranial recordings, experimental tasks, and clinical cases. It distinguishes motor response inhibition from reward-based decision-making and long-term behavioural regulation. The reviewed evidence supports a network account in which frontal and subcortical regions make partly distinct, interacting contributions to detecting relevant signals, coordinating control, and regulating action. Nevertheless, findings from individual cases and patient populations must be interpreted cautiously because lesions are rarely anatomically isolated and clinical conditions may affect several processes at once. A central limitation in this literature is therefore the difficulty of separating response inhibition from attention, action selection, and decision-making.