Ferrucci Roberta, Serino Silvia, Ruggiero Fabiana, Repetto Claudia, Colombo Desirée, Pedroli Elisa, Marceglia Sara, Riva Giuseppe, Priori Alberto
Aldo Ravelli Center for Neurotechnology and Experimental Brain Therapeutics, Department of Health Sciences, International Medical School, University of Milan, Milan, Italy.
Neurophysiology Unit, IRCCS Ca' Granda Foundation Maggiore Policlinico Hospital, Milan, Italy.
Front Neurosci. 2019 Mar 12;13:198. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2019.00198. eCollection 2019.
Spatial cognition is an umbrella term used to refer to the complex set of abilities necessary to encode, categorize, and use spatial information from the surrounding environment to move effectively and orient within it. Experimental studies indicate that the cerebellum belongs to the neural network involved in spatial cognition, although its exact role in this function remains unclear. Our aim was to investigate in a pilot study using a virtual reality navigation task in healthy subjects whether cerebellar transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a non-invasive technique, influences spatial navigation. Forty healthy volunteers (24 women; age range = 20-42 years; years of education range 13-18) were recruited. The virtual reality spatial navigation task comprised two phases: encoding, in which participants actively navigated the environment and learned the spatial locations for one object, and retrieval, in which they retrieved the position of the object they had discovered and memorized in the previous encoding phase, starting from another starting point. Participants received tDCS stimulation (anodal or sham according to the experimental condition they were assigned to) for 20 min before beginning the retrieval phase. Our results showed that cerebellar tDCS left the accuracy of the three indexes used to measure effective navigational abilities unchanged. Hence, cerebellar tDCS had no influence on the retrieval phase for the spatial maps stored. Further studies, enrolling a larger sample and testing a different stimulation protocol, may give a greater insight into the role of the cerebellum in spatial navigation.
空间认知是一个总括性术语，用于指代一系列复杂的能力，这些能力是对来自周围环境的空间信息进行编码、分类并加以利用，从而在其中有效移动和定位所必需的。实验研究表明，小脑属于参与空间认知的神经网络，尽管其在该功能中的具体作用仍不清楚。我们的目的是在一项初步研究中，使用虚拟现实导航任务，探究在健康受试者中，非侵入性技术——小脑经颅直流电刺激（tDCS）是否会影响空间导航。招募了40名健康志愿者（24名女性；年龄范围=20 - 42岁；受教育年限范围13 - 18年）。虚拟现实空间导航任务包括两个阶段：编码阶段，参与者在该阶段积极探索环境并学习一个物体的空间位置；检索阶段，他们从另一个起点开始，检索在前一个编码阶段发现并记住的物体的位置。在开始检索阶段前，参与者接受20分钟的tDCS刺激（根据他们被分配的实验条件，阳极刺激或假刺激）。我们的结果表明，小脑tDCS并未改变用于测量有效导航能力的三个指标的准确性。因此，小脑tDCS对存储的空间地图的检索阶段没有影响。进一步的研究，纳入更大的样本并测试不同的刺激方案，可能会更深入地了解小脑在空间导航中的作用。
