Abstract
Action planning is an important decision-making process, which can be specially affected by environment. Response selection during action planning has been demonstrated to be modulated by tVNS. Therefore, tVNS shows a great potential for modulating the action planning process. We aimed to explore the tVNS-induced effect on action planning in behavioural and electrophysiology. Twenty-eight participants were randomly divided into two groups (active group and sham group). A single-blind, sham-controlled between-subject design was applied to explore the effect of online-tVNS (i.e., tVNS overlapping with the task) on action planning paradigm. We measured and compared reaction time (RT) and movement-related cortical potentials (MRCPs) before and after tVNS between active and sham groups. As compared to sham group, for the ipsilateral hand/contralateral hemisphere relative to the stimulated side, active tVNS significantly reduced the reaction time and decreased the MRCP amplitude mainly in the challenging tasks. Our results indicate that tVNS can produce a lateralization effect on action planning, especially plays an important role in the more challenging tasks as reflected both in the behavioural and electrophysiological results.
Highlights
Before executing a movement, there is usually a psychological rehearsal, i.e., the action planning, which is often influenced by the current environment
We found that reaction time (RT) was faster in the LE task as compared to the LD task (t(13)=4.9307, p=0.0005) and RT was faster in the RE task as compared to the RD task (t(13)=3.5542, p=0.0016)
Such result suggested that participants responded faster due to receiving active transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS) rather than being familiar with the task as the experiment processed
Summary
There is usually a psychological rehearsal, i.e., the action planning, which is often influenced by the current environment. Action planning is essentially a decision-making process that directly judges whether a particular action is adequate to specific environment. Our brain generally simulates alternative actions to judge the plausibility[1]–[3]. It has been confirmed in behavioural researches that the cognitive decision-making process is affected by physical body posture. The decision-making process will take less time and be easier when the body posture is consistent with the action [7], [8]. It has been suggested that the parietal lobe and precentral cortex can be organized according to the action target and the spatial position of the hand, rather than activating the muscle to perform the action [9], [10]
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