Interactive effects of music and prefrontal cortex stimulation in modulating response inhibition

Farshad Alizadeh Mansouri,Paul B Fitzgerald,Shapour Jaberzadeh,Daniel J Fehring,Nicola Acevedo,Rosin Illipparampil

doi:10.1038/s41598-017-18119-x

Abstract

Influential hypotheses propose that alterations in emotional state influence decision processes and executive control of behavior. Both music and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of prefrontal cortex affect emotional state, however interactive effects of music and tDCS on executive functions remain unknown. Learning to inhibit inappropriate responses is an important aspect of executive control which is guided by assessing the decision outcomes such as errors. We found that high-tempo music, but not low-tempo music or low-level noise, significantly influenced learning and implementation of inhibitory control. In addition, a brief period of tDCS over prefrontal cortex specifically interacted with high-tempo music and altered its effects on executive functions. Measuring event-related autonomic and arousal response of participants indicated that exposure to task demands and practice led to a decline in arousal response to the decision outcome and high-tempo music enhanced such practice-related processes. However, tDCS specifically moderated the high-tempo music effect on the arousal response to errors and concomitantly restored learning and improvement in executive functions. Here, we show that tDCS and music interactively influence the learning and implementation of inhibitory control. Our findings indicate that alterations in the arousal-emotional response to the decision outcome might underlie these interactive effects.

Highlights

Inhibition of inappropriate responses is an important aspect of executive control of behavior[1] and patients with neuropsychiatric disorders show deficits in such executive functions[2,3,4]
Our findings indicate that practice induced remarkable behavioral adjustments that appeared as a decline in Stop signal reaction time (SSRT) and an increase in response time (RT) in Go trials (Figs 2a and 4a)
The transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) influenced both the SSRT and RT, but in both cases the tDCS effects were dependent on the music type (Figs 2b and 4b)

Summary

Introduction

Inhibition of inappropriate responses is an important aspect of executive control of behavior[1] and patients with neuropsychiatric disorders show deficits in such executive functions[2,3,4]. Previous studies have shown that background music might exert no effect[19,20], positive influence[7,9,10,11,12,21,22,23,24,25] or even negative effect[20,25,26,27,28] on cognitive functions. The effects of music might be mediated through alterations in emotional state that affect focusing on the currently performed task[7,9,36]. Influential hypothesis proposes that alterations in emotional and arousal state during cognitive task performance influence the decision process[46,47]. We hypothesized that music and tDCS might modulate arousal/ emotional state, which are associated with emotional and cognitive control and influence learning and implementation of executive functions in the context of goal-directed behaviours. Anodal or sham stimulation was delivered over DLPFC in a rest period between the pre- and post-tDCS sessions (Fig. 1b)

Methods

Results

Conclusion