Prefrontal Modulation of Visual Processing and Sustained Attention in Aging, a tDCS–EEG Coregistration Approach

Abstract

The ability to sustain attention is integral to healthy cognition in aging. The right PFC (rPFC) is critical for maintaining high levels of attentional focus. Whether plasticity of this region can be harnessed to support sustained attention in older adults is unknown. We used transcranial direct current stimulation to increase cortical excitability of the rPFC, while monitoring behavioral and electrophysiological markers of sustained attention in older adults with suboptimal sustained attention capacity. During rPFC transcranial direct current stimulation, fewer lapses of attention occurred and electroencephalography signals of frontal engagement and early visual attention were enhanced. To further verify these results, we repeated the experiment in an independent cohort of cognitively typical older adults using a different sustained attention paradigm. Again, prefrontal stimulation was associated with fewer attentional lapses. These experiments suggest the rPFC can be manipulated in later years to increase top-down modulation over early sensory processing and improve sustained attention performance. This holds valuable information for the development of neurorehabilitation protocols to ameliorate age-related deficits in this capacity.

Opposite effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on sustained attention in individuals with high and low levels of dispositional mindfulness

“…As we hypothesized, individuals with low dispositional mindfulness benefited from the stimulation, as their response times decreased compared to the sham condition. This fits well with the notion that anodal stimulation increases the excitability of underlying neural populations (Dieckhöfer et al, 2006;Hunter et al, 2013;Nitsche & Paulus, 2001), including the prefrontal cortex (Imburgio & Orr, 2018;Miler et al, 2018), and the finding that anodal stimulation of the right prefrontal cortex appears to enhance sustained attention (Brosnan et al, 2018;Nelson et al, 2014). One remarkable and unexpected finding, however, is that the stimulation of the prefrontal cortex affected negatively the performance of the high dispositional mindfulness participants in our sustained attention task.…”

The Influence of Shift Work on the Quality of Sleep and Executive Functions

“…They hypothesized that the results seemed to be due to the accumulation of sleep pressure with time awake. Sleep deprivation also decreases neural activity in PFC (a region critical for alertness and sustained attention), thereby disturbing sustained attention [16,41]. Finally, Lim and Dinges recognized vigilant attention as a cognitive process that is consistently and strongly vulnerable to sleep deprivation [42].…”

Pupillometry as an Objective Measure of Sustained Attention in Young and Older Listeners

“…Our second aim is to determine whether pupillometry as a measure of effort to sustain attention is also applicable to older listeners. Attentive capacity is known to decline with age (e.g., Brosnan et al., 2018; Dørum et al., 2016; Lufi, Segev, Blum, Rosen, & Haimov, 2015; Tu et al., 2018; van der Leeuw et al., 2017). An objective measure of sustained auditory attention would, therefore, be useful to quantify such difficulties and assess intervention outcomes.…”