Revisiting the Neurocognitive Correlates of the Behavioral Inhibition and Activation Systems

The Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS) and the Behavioral Activation System (BAS) are cornerstones of neurobehavioral research. Personality scales have been developed to capture the behavioral and motivational tendencies associated with these systems, and many studies have attempted to link these scales with basic neurocognitive processes. The results, however, have been inconclusive. Here, we aim to replicate a seminal study on this topic by Amodio et al. (2008), in which the authors used a Go/No-Go task to test the association of the trait BIS with cognitive control and the BAS trait with approach tendency. The authors found significant correlations that were mutually exclusive from each other; BAS did not correlate with measures of cognitive control, and BIS did not correlated with measures of approach tendency. Despite the paper’s high citation frequency and influence on the field, there has been no direct replication to date. These factors motivated the inclusion of this study in the #EEGManyLabs project, an international community-driven effort to replicate influential EEG results and this registered report forms a part of this initiative. Following the original study, a Go/No-Go experiment will be performed with a total of 320 participants across eight replicating labs. EEG will be recorded both during the experiment and in an eight-minute resting period. Target variables are the amplitude of the N2 during a successfully inhibited response, the amplitude of the error-related negativity (ERN) after an erroneous response, left frontal asymmetry (LFA) during rest, and trait BIS/BAS measured by the Carver and White questionnaire. Both Pearson’s and Spearman rank sum correlations, as well as regression analyses will be used to test the hypotheses that trait BIS is associated with ERN and N2 amplitudes, and that trait BAS is associated with LFA during rest.