Abstract
Multiple object tracking (MOT) is a complex task recruiting a distributed network of brain regions. There are also marked individual differences in MOT performance. A positive causal relationship between the anterior intraparietal sulcus (AIPS), an integral region in the MOT attention network and inter-individual variation in MOT performance has not been previously established. The present study used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a form of non-invasive brain stimulation, in order to examine such a causal link. Active anodal stimulation was applied to the right AIPS and the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) (and sham stimulation), an area associated with working memory (but not MOT) while participants completed a MOT task. Stimulation to the right AIPS significantly improved MOT accuracy more than the other two conditions. The results confirm a causal role of the AIPS in the MOT task and illustrate that tDCS has the ability to improve MOT performance.
Highlights
Multiple object tracking (MOT) is a dynamic, effortful task that assesses how many moving objects a person can attend to over a short period of time (Pylyshyn and Storm, 1988)
Data from Culham et al, 2001 suggests a right lateralized recruitment in frontal brain areas during MOT. Stimulation of this area may lead to inadvertent affects on MOT performance, and because we focused on the right anterior intraparietal sulcus (AIPS) in the present study, we used the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) for the control stimulation condition
The present study evaluated the efficacy of using targeted noninvasive brain stimulation to improve understanding of the causal role of the right AIPS in MOT performance through improved learning and skill acquisition of MOT. transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) was targeted to the right AIPS, a brain area that plays a unique and integral role for tracking multiple objects (Howe et al, 2009)
Summary
Multiple object tracking (MOT) is a dynamic, effortful task that assesses how many moving objects a person can attend to over a short period of time (Pylyshyn and Storm, 1988). There are marked inter-individual differences in MOT tracking capacity, reflecting inter-individual variation in spatial ability (Oksama and Hyönä, 2004). Given such variability, it is important to understand the underlying neural mechanisms involved in performance of dynamic attentional tasks such as the MOT
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