Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation over the Posterior Parietal Cortex Increases Nontarget Retrieval during Visual Working Memory.

Abstract

Visual working memory (VWM) requires precise feature binding. Previous studies have revealed a close relationship between the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) and feature binding during VWM; this study further examined their causal relationship through three transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) experiments. In Experiment 1 (N = 57), participants underwent three sessions of tDCS separately, including PPC stimulation, occipital cortex stimulation, and sham stimulation, and completed delayed estimation tasks for orientations before and after stimulation. Results showed that tDCS over PPC selectively prolonged recall response time (RT) and increased the probability of nontarget responses (a.k.a. failure of feature binding, pNT). In Experiment 2 (N = 29), combining metacognition estimation, we further investigated whether the effects of PPC stimulation were attributed to misbinding (i.e., participants self-reported "remembered" in nontarget responses) or informed guessing trials (participants self-reported "forgotten" in nontarget responses). We replicated the main findings in Experiment 1 and observed greater tDCS effects of PPC on RT in informed guessing trials while there are comparable effects on pNT in these two types of trials. In Experiment 3 (N = 28), we then examined whether the tDCS effects over PPC specifically influenced the memory retrieval process by using a change detection task. We found that PPC stimulation did not influence the recognition RT or accuracy. Together, this study provided direct causal evidence supporting the specific involvement of PPC in feature binding during VWM retrieval, from both aspects of speed and response preference, expanding our understanding of the neural basis of feature binding in VWM.