Increased contextual cue utilization with tDCS over the prefrontal cortex during a recognition task

Abstract

The precise role of the prefrontal and posterior parietal cortices in recognition performance remains controversial, with questions about whether these regions contribute to recognition via the availability of mnemonic evidence or via decision biases and retrieval orientation. Here we used an explicit memory cueing paradigm, whereby external cues probabilistically predict upcoming memoranda as old or new, in our case with 75% validity, and these cues affect recognition decision biases in the direction of the cue. The present study applied bilateral transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over prefrontal or posterior parietal cortex, or sham tDCS, to test the causal role of these regions in recognition accuracy or decision biasing. Participants who received tDCS over prefrontal cortex showed increased cue utilization compared to tDCS over posterior parietal cortex and sham tDCS, suggesting that the prefrontal cortex is involved in processes that contribute to decision biases in memory.

Theta band high definition transcranial alternating current stimulation, but not transcranial direct current stimulation, improves associative memory performance

“…At the end of the stimulation session, the current was again ramped up to 2 mA over 30 seconds. This procedure is commonly used to blind participants in TES studies 27,58,59 . For the first five minutes of stimulation, subjects were asked to relax and let their mind wander.…”

Null Effects on Working Memory and Verbal Fluency Tasks When Applying Anodal tDCS to the Inferior Frontal Gyrus of Healthy Participants

“…One study reported that anodal tDCS applied to left anterior temporal lobe can decrease false alarms for semantically related lures (Boggio et al, 2009 ), whilst another reported a decrease in false alarms for associative, but not semantically related lures (Díez et al, 2017 ). Other studies showed an increase in hits (i.e., correct yes responses to probes) when targeting the parietal cortex with a bilateral montage (i.e., right-anodal/left-cathodal), whilst the opposite montage (i.e., left-anodal/right cathodal) increased false alarms (see Pergolizzi and Chua, 2015 , 2016 ; but see also, Pergolizzi and Chua, 2017 ).…”

The causal neural substrates of statistical learning

“…This was interpreted as evidence of direct frontoparietal involvement in processing location-based regularities. These results aligned with two other stimulation studies that looked at target-context processing in contextual cuing that argued for a direct role of the frontal cortex (Pergolizzi & Chua, 2017;Zinchenko, Conci, Taylor, Müller, & Geyer, 2019).…”