Transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation enhances learning of novel letter-sound relationships in adults

Abstract

Background: Reading is a critical skill in modern society but is significantly more difficult to acquire during adulthood. Many adults are required to learn a new orthography after this window closes for personal or vocational reasons and while many programs and training methods exist for learning to read in adulthood, none result in native-like fluency. Implantable cervical vagus nerve stimulation is capable of driving neural plasticity but is invasive and not practical as a reading intervention. Objective: The goal of the current study was to evaluate whether non-invasive transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) is effective at enhancing novel orthography acquisition in young adults. Methods: We enrolled 37 typically developing participants and randomly assigned them to a computer control, device sham control, earlobe stimulation control, or experimental transcutaneous auricular stimulation (taVNS) group. Participants then learned novel letter-sound correspondences in Hebrew over five training lessons. Performance was assessed using three measures to evaluate various aspects of reading: Letter ID, Automaticity, and Decoding. Results: The taVNS group significantly outperformed the three control groups on both the Automaticity and Decoding tasks. There was no difference on the Letter ID task. Conclusions: These results demonstrate, for the first time, that taVNS is capable of improving aspects of reading acquisition in adults. These findings have potential implications for a wide range of cognitive tasks.

Rapid Effects of Vagus Nerve Stimulation on Sensory Processing Through Activation of Neuromodulatory Systems

“…This mechanism of action can be strengthened over multiple sessions of pairing to produce long-term permanent reorganization of sensory pathways that alters perception. Taken together, these works suggest phasic VNS has great potential as a next generation neuromodulation technology for rehabilitative motor and sensory therapies ( Neuhaus et al, 2007 ; Kreuzer et al, 2014 ; Engineer et al, 2015 ; Tyler et al, 2017 ; Vanneste et al, 2017 ; Kilgard et al, 2018 ; Adcock et al, 2020 ; Llanos et al, 2020 ; Thakkar et al, 2020 ; Altidor et al, 2021 ; Phillips et al, 2021 ).…”

Intervention of Fluency and Anxiety in Mindfulness Training of Shooting

“…(1) The control group was followed up with relevant questionnaires; athletes with strong learning and comprehension ability can also learn in the questionnaire; the measured level of mindfulness will increase; this is an invisible learning. (2) Due to the characteristics of athlete management, the control group members who get along day and night may inquire about learning related content in the experimental group members; this is a phenomenon similar to “stealing.” (3) Although some mindfulness exercises will be done in the training class, the team members rarely did mindful breathing and body scanning exercises after class, so, at most, it is just a clarification of cognition in class, or the guidance of some adjustment methods is working, and the athletes did not experience the process of actively internalizing mindfulness practice, so as shown in Figure 1 , in the follow-up test, the mindfulness level of the experimental group decreased, while that of the control group hardly changed [ 9 ]. This time between mindfulness and the fluency of shooting athletes introduce emotion regulation self-efficacy as a regulation variable, and the interaction with mindfulness affects the fluency state [ 10 ].…”

The efficacy and safety of transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation in patients with mild cognitive impairment: A double blinded randomized clinical trial

“…While in the sham taVNS group, another pair of auricular acupoints were stimulated, including elbow (scaphoid fossa, SF 3 ) and shoulder (SF 4,5 ), out of the distribution of vagus nerve. The scaphoid fossa was the stimulated site as the sham control in this study, which was different from the stimulation of the ear lobe as the sham stimulation in some studies [22][23][24]. The interventions were illustrated in Fig.…”