Modulation of inhibitory control by prefrontal anodal tDCS: A crossover double-blind sham-controlled fMRI study

Abstract

Prefrontal anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been proposed as a potential approach to improve inhibitory control performance. The functional consequences of tDCS during inhibition tasks remain, however, largely unresolved. We addressed this question by analyzing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) recorded while participants completed a Go/NoGo task after right-lateralized prefrontal anodal tDCS with a crossover, sham-controlled, double-blind experimental design. We replicated previous evidence for an absence of offline effect of anodal stimulation on Go/NoGo performance. The fMRI results revealed a larger increase in right ventrolateral prefrontal activity for Go than NoGo trials in the anodal than sham condition. This pattern suggests that tDCS-induced increases in cortical excitability have larger effects on fMRI activity in regions with a lower task-related engagement. This was the case for the right prefrontal cortex in the Go condition in our task because while reactive inhibition was not engaged during execution trials, the unpredictability of the demand for inhibitory control still incited an engagement of proactive inhibition. Exploratory analyses further revealed that right prefrontal stimulation interacted with task-related functional demands in the supplementary motor area and the thalamus. Our collective results emphasize the dependency of offline tDCS functional effects on the task-related engagement of the stimulated areas and suggest that this factor might partly account for the discrepancies in the functional effects of tDCS observed in previous studies.

Effects of transcranial direct current stimulation of left and right inferior frontal gyrus on creative divergent thinking are moderated by changes in inhibition control

“…Regarding IC, no direct effect of tDCS could be revealed. This result might be due to the simplicity of GNGT, i.e., the ease to discriminate between Go and NoGo stimuli (Sallard et al 2018). Moreover, the lack of offline effects of tDCS on GNGT performance reported by Sallard et al (2018) corroborates findings by previous tDCS/GNGT studies stimulating the right IFG (Cunillera et al 2016;Campanella et al 2017).…”

“…This result might be due to the simplicity of GNGT, i.e., the ease to discriminate between Go and NoGo stimuli (Sallard et al 2018). Moreover, the lack of offline effects of tDCS on GNGT performance reported by Sallard et al (2018) corroborates findings by previous tDCS/GNGT studies stimulating the right IFG (Cunillera et al 2016;Campanella et al 2017). Research has demonstrated that offline stimulation improved IC during a SST (Cai et al 2016) but not GNGT (Campanella et al 2017).…”

“…Other factors that might explain our results regarding the effect of tDCS on GNGT could be baseline activity levels. A study by Sallard et al (2018) suggested that the baseline level of engagement of the brain areas of interest might be a critical factor in determining the functional effect of tDCS, which was confirmed by changes in the BOLD signal after a-tDCS manifesting only under conditions of low task-related activity.…”

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) combined with cognitive training in adolescent boys with ADHD: a double-blind, randomised, sham-controlled trial

“…Further, this study stimulated "F8" in line with other studies [51][52][53][109][110][111]; however, improved performance on inhibitory control tasks in healthy adults has been reported when stimulating T4-Fz and F8-Cz intersection [112][113][114][115][116] or F6 [117][118][119][120], which cover the rIFC along with areas closer to the surface implicated in motor inhibition (e.g., superior and middle frontal cortex, and the supplementary motor area) [7,42,121] and attention (e.g., right dlPFC, part of the dorsal attention network and typically underactivated in ADHD) [7,102].…”

Features of brain activity in alcohol dependence in the task of inhibitory control

“…Во-первых, у пациентов с нарушенным ингибиторным контролем в процессе выполнения теста Go / No -go происходило снижение спектральной мощности α-ритма во фронтальной коре головного мозга, тогда как у пациентов без нарушений ингибиторного контроля -в центральной коре. Как правило, ослабление ингибиторного контроля отражается в виде снижения активности в префронтальной коре [1, 13,14]. Следовательно, наблюдаемое снижение α-активности во время задачи Go / No -go в лобной коре может объективно отражать дефицит мозговых ресурсов в подавлении реакции на стимул.…”