Abstract

Transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS) can enhance vision in the healthy and diseased brain. Yet, the impact of multi-day tRNS on large-scale cortical networks is still unknown. We investigated the impact of tRNS coupled with behavioral training on resting-state functional connectivity and attention. We trained human subjects for 4 consecutive days on two attention tasks, while receiving tRNS over the intraparietal sulci, the middle temporal areas, or Sham stimulation. We measured resting-state functional connectivity of nodes of the dorsal and ventral attention network (DVAN) before and after training. We found a strong behavioral improvement and increased connectivity within the DVAN after parietal stimulation only. Crucially, behavioral improvement positively correlated with connectivity measures. We conclude changes in connectivity are a marker for the enduring effect of tRNS upon behavior. Our results suggest that tRNS has strong potential to augment cognitive capacity in healthy individuals and promote recovery in the neurological population.

Highlights

  • Vision and attention are the primary sensory and cognitive modalities through which humans interact with the environment

  • We examined the effect of Transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS) delivered concurrently with the task in a 4-d­ ay perceptual learning (PL) protocol (Figure 1A, orange section) that embedded two attentional tasks: an orientation discrimination (OD) task in which participants were asked to determine if the Gabors presented either side of a fixation cross had the ‘same’ or ‘different’ orientation, and a temporal order judgments (TOJs) task in which participants were asked to determine if the Gabors’ onsets were simultaneous or asynchronous (Figure 1C and D; for a detailed description of the experimental procedure, tasks, and the stimuli see ‘Materials and methods’ section)

  • We examined the effect of multi-­session hf-t­ RNS and training on resting-­state functional connectivity of the dorsal and ventral attention network (DVAN), the functional network targeted by stimulation and training protocol

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Summary

Introduction

Vision and attention are the primary sensory and cognitive modalities through which humans interact with the environment. PL approaches have been limited in their applicability, due in part to the long and intensive training protocols which largely impede their use (Dosher and Lu, 2017; Das et al, 2014; Li et al, 2004; Huang et al, 2012; Zhang et al, 2010a; Zhang et al, 2010b; Dosher and Lu, 2005). Lacking are PL approaches to increase the rate of learning, valuable for populations with limited abilities to engage in demanding perceptual tasks. A notable exception is ‘cross-t­asks’ training, in which learning protocols are significantly shortened by adopting a training procedure on two different tasks with the same stimuli simultaneously (Szpiro et al, 2014; Wright et al, 2010)

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