Abstract
Transcranial electrical stimulation (tES) has become a valuable research tool for the investigation of neurophysiological processes underlying human action and cognition. In recent years, striking evidence for the neuromodulatory effects of transcranial direct current stimulation, transcranial alternating current stimulation, and transcranial random noise stimulation has emerged. While the wealth of knowledge has been gained about tES in the motor domain and, to a lesser extent, about its ability to modulate human cognition, surprisingly little is known about its impact on perceptual processing, particularly in the auditory domain. Moreover, while only a few studies systematically investigated the impact of auditory tES, it has already been applied in a large number of clinical trials, leading to a remarkable imbalance between basic and clinical research on auditory tES. Here, we review the state of the art of tES application in the auditory domain focussing on the impact of neuromodulation on acoustic perception and its potential for clinical application in the treatment of auditory related disorders.
Highlights
During the last decades transcranial electrical stimulation has been revived as a technique to directly influence brain activity and its related alterations in behavior (Fox, 2011)
By revealing polarity-specific effects of anodal and cathodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on auditory cortex (AC) reactivity, we demonstrated for the first time, that the excitability of the AC can be directly modulated by tDCS
This study demonstrated an improvement of temporal resolution abilities after bilateral auditory tDCS, traditionally, the AC has been proposed to show a relative tradeoff in spectral and temporal processing of complex acoustic signals such as speech and music, with left auditory cortical areas being tuned for temporal resolution and right auditory cortical areas being more amenable to spectral resolution (Zatorre and Belin, 2001; Poeppel, 2003)
Summary
During the last decades transcranial electrical stimulation (tES) has been revived as a technique to directly influence brain activity and its related alterations in behavior (Fox, 2011). Besides these direct electrophysiological evidences for tDCS-related alterations of the human AC, several further studies reported effects of auditory tDCS on different aspects of acoustic perception (for specific stimulation parameters and outcome measures see Table 1).
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