Bonder Taly, Gopher Daniel, Yeshurun Yaffa
Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel.
Department of Psychology, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.
Front Psychol. 2018 Feb 19;9:159. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00159. eCollection 2018.
The present study examined the mutual influence of cortical neuroenhancement and allocation of spatial attention on perception. Specifically, it explored the effects of transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) on visual acuity measured with a Landolt gap task and attentional precues. The exogenous cues were used to draw attention either to the location of the target or away from it, generating significant performance benefits and costs. Anodal tDCS applied to posterior occipital area for 15 min improved performance during stimulation, reflecting heightened visual acuity. Reaction times were lower, and accuracy was higher in the tDCS group, compared to a sham control group. Additionally, in post-stimulation trials tDCS significantly interacted with the effect of precuing. Reaction times were lower in valid cued trials (benefit) and higher in invalid trials (cost) compared to neutrally cued trials, the effect which was pronounced stronger in tDCS group than in sham control group. The increase of cost and benefit effects in the tDCS group was of a similar magnitude, suggesting that anodal tDCS influenced the overall process of attention orienting. The observed interaction between the stimulation of the visual cortex and precueing indicates a magnification of attention modulation.
本研究考察了皮质神经增强与空间注意力分配对感知的相互影响。具体而言，研究探讨了经颅直流电刺激（tDCS）对使用Landolt环任务测量的视敏度以及注意力提示的影响。外部提示用于将注意力吸引到目标位置或使其远离目标位置，从而产生显著的表现优势和劣势。对枕叶后部区域施加15分钟的阳极tDCS可在刺激期间改善表现，这反映出视敏度提高。与假刺激对照组相比，tDCS组的反应时间更短，准确率更高。此外，在刺激后试验中，tDCS与提示效应存在显著交互作用。与中性提示试验相比，有效提示试验（优势）中的反应时间更短，无效试验（劣势）中的反应时间更长，这种效应在tDCS组中比在假刺激对照组中更为明显。tDCS组中优势和劣势效应的增加幅度相似，表明阳极tDCS影响了注意力定向的整体过程。视觉皮层刺激与提示之间观察到的交互作用表明注意力调制得到了增强。
