Stimulation in the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex Changes Subjective Evaluation of Percepts

Abstract

Nelson and Narens have proposed a metacognition model that dissociates the objective processing of information (object-level) and the subjective evaluation of the performance (i.e., the metalevel). Neurophysiological evidence also indicates that the prefrontal cortices (PFC) are the brain areas which perform the metalevel function [1]–[3]. A corresponding neural mechanism of Nelson and Narens’s model, called dynamic filtering theory [4], [5], indicates that object-level processing is distributed in the posterior cortices and regulated by the prefrontal cortices with a filtering or gating mechanism to select appropriate signals and suppress inappropriate signals and noise. Based on this model, a hypothesis can be developed that, in the case of uncertainty or overloading of object-level processing, the prefrontal cortices will become more active in order to modulate signals and noise. This hypothesis is supported by a recent fMRI study [6] showing that the PFC (Brodmann area 9, BA9) was activated when subjects were overloaded in a bimodal attentional task, compared to a unimodal task. Here, we report a study showing that applying repetitive transmagnetic stimulation (rTMS) over the BA9 in order to interfere with its functional activity resulted in significant increas in guessed responses, compared to three other control conditions (i.e., no-TMS, sham TMS on BA9, and rTMS on Cz). The results are compatible with the dynamic filtering theory and suggest that a malfunction of the PFC would weaken the quality of meta-cognitive percepts and increase the number of guessed responses.

Overlapping and unique neural circuits are activated during perceptual decision making and confidence

“…For example, dlPFC has been implicated in both the perceptual decision (Philiastides et al, 2011;Rahnev et al, 2011a;Hunt et al, 2015;Georgiev et al, 2016) and confidence (Lau and Passingham, 2006;Rounis et al, 2010;Chiang et al, 2014;Shekhar and Rahnev, 2018). Our results suggest that at least a subregion of dlPFC is in fact more active during confidence compared to decision processes.…”

Should a few null findings falsify prefrontal theories of conscious perception?

“…Finally, there are also numerous studies showing that TMS and lesion to human PFC can affect many other aspects of visual perception (Barceló et al, 2000;Turatto et al, 2004;Ruff et al, 2006;Philiastides et al, 2011;Lee and D'Esposito, 2012;Ritzinger et al, 2012;Chiang et al, 2014;Rahnev et al, 2016), and more recent neuropsychological work has demonstrated that individuals with unilateral damage to PFC often display pronounced deficits on visual tasks. For example, Barceló et al (2000) showed that individuals with unilateral focal lesions in the lateral prefrontal cortex exhibited impairments in the ability to regulate dependent activity in extrastriate regions and detect visual targets in the visual field contralateral to the damage.…”

Prefrontal modulation during chewing performance in occlusal dysesthesia patients: a functional near-infrared spectroscopy study

“…Recently, neuromodulation therapy has been clinically recommended for treating cognitive deficits in psychiatric disorders [64][65][66][67][68]. Our results in this study may suggest that prefrontal modulation in OD patients might be treated by using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) or transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in a dental clinic.…”