The Effect of Prefrontal Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation on Attention Network Function in Healthy Volunteers

Abstract

Twenty minutes of active 2 mA tDCS over left DLPFC is associated with greater executive attention in healthy humans.

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.…”

“…Evidence suggests that a single session of tDCS can acutely raise the neural membrane potential to facilitate the firing of cortical neurons near the anodal electrode (Dieckhöfer et al, 2006). Interestingly, transcranial direct-current stimulation can temporally enhance prefrontal functioning (Miler, Meron, Baldwin, & Garner, 2018), especially with extracranial cathodes (Imburgio & Orr, 2018). While the effect of tDCS on sustained attention and vigilance performance has been the object of little research, Nelson, McKinley, Golob, Warm and Parasuraman (2014) reported an enhancement in vigilance performance, blood flow velocity and cerebral oxygenation when participants carrying out a simulated air traffic control task received transcranial stimulation of the prefrontal cortex.…”

Examining the Impact of Working Memory Training and Transcranial Direct-current Stimulation on Monitoring for Color Targets in Dynamic Visual Displays

“…However, as tDCS has been applied to a greater range of brain regions and with different electrode configurations, it has become clear that its effects cannot be so clearly distinguished and that results may influenced by the present state of underlying networks, by inter-individual differences and, in unilateral montages, by the interhemispheric balance of activity (Fecteau et al, 2007;Tremblay et al, 2014). Similar to other recent studies, the present study employed a bilateral montage, which should minimize variation in the balance of activity between hemispheres (Miler et al, 2017;Nelson, McKinley, Golob, Warm, Parasuraman, 2014;Oliveira et al, 2013) and like 14 out of 16 studies in a recent meta-analysis, the present study focused exclusively on anodal stimulation of the left DLPFC (Hill, Fitzgerald, Hoy, 2016). However, two recent reviews by another group of authors, one examining 117 studies and the other 198 studies, have even suggested that single-session tDCS has no reliable effect upon cognitive performance (Horvath, Forte, Carter, 2015b, 2015a, although this may be attributable to issues with inter-subject variability (Horvath, Carter, Forte, 2014) and the resting brain state dependency of stimulation effects (Silvanto, Muggleton, Walsh, 2008).…”

“…The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) has important roles in high level cognition, including WM and the executive control of attention (Lara Wallis, 2015;Rossi, Pessoa, Desimone, Ungerleider, 2009), and has often been targeted in tDCS studies with a view to improving these functions (Tremblay et al, 2014). Stimulation of the DLPFC has been associated with a wide range of outcomes, including improvements in associative learning (Kincses, Antal, Nitsche, Brtfai, Paulus, 2004), recognition memory (Pergolizzi Chua, 2017;Smirni, Turriziani, Mangano, Cipolotti, Oliveri, 2015;Zwissler et al, 2014), verbal fluency (Iyer et al, 2005), anxiety-related attentional bias (Clarke, Browning, Hammond, Notebaert, MacLeod, 2014), risk taking behavior (Fecteau et al, 2007), processing emotional stimuli (Boggio et al, 2007), WM (Berryhill Jones, 2012;Fregni et al, 2005;Keeser et al, 2011;Mulquiney, Hoy, Daskalakis, Fitzgerald, 2011;Teo, Hoy, Daskalakis, Fitzgerald, 2011) and the executive control attentional network (Miler, Meron, Baldwin, Garner, 2017). We specifically examine the efficacy of a bilateral stimulation montage with the anode over the left DLPFC (and cathode over the right DLPFC), relative to a sham control, as this electrode configuration has been shown to afford benefits to WM (Oliveira et al, 2013;Saggini et al, 2016).…”

The impact of anodal tDCS on attentional networks as a function of trait anxiety and depressive symptoms: A preregistered double-blind sham-controlled experiment

“…In this way, researchers examined the impact of clinical interventions on the attentional subsystems (e.g., Heeren, Mogoaşe et al, 2015;Jha et al, 2007;Kwak et al, 2020; for a discussion, see Posner et al, 2019). Among these options, transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) has been identified as a promising tool to modify the attentional networks (e.g., Lo et al, 2019;Roy et al, 2015), and especially the executive conflict network of attention (e.g., Miler et al, 2017;Silva et al, 2017).…”