Cognitive Neurophysiology, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany.
Cognitive Neurophysiology, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany; Chair of Lifespan Developmental Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany.
Neuroimage. 2019 Oct 1;199:217-227. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.05.009. Epub 2019 May 23.
Successful action control requires the ability to attend to relevant sensory signals in the environment. This, however, can be complicated when different sensory inputs compete for the brain's limited resources. Under such conditions, sensory processes interact with top-down attention to selectively process goal-relevant stimuli, while inhibiting irrelevant or distracting sensory signals. In the current study, we set out to provide causal mechanistic insights for whether and how prefrontal regions are involved in resolving attentional-perceptual conflicts. To this end, we applied atDCS and examined neurophysiological processes of selective auditory perception. To evaluate whether atDCS differentially affects intermingled neurophysiological subprocesses involved during conflict resolution, we decomposed the EEG data using residue iteration decomposition (RIDE). We show that the right prefrontal regions are causally involved in resolving attentional-perceptual conflicts and that atDCS increases the efficacy to do so. The data show that dissociable neurophysiological signals are specifically affected by atDCS. Conflict resolution processes that involve inhibition of competing stimuli and response evaluation and are associated with right middle frontal gyrus (BA46) seem to become intensified by atDCS during the resolution of attentional-perceptual conflicts. After stimulation the early stimulus processing level was also less prone to sensory conflicts, but this alone could not explain the increased behavioral efficacy associated with atDCS. These observed effects likely reflect changes in neuronal gain control mechanisms. Taken together, results of this study may have implications for treating attentional hyperactivity disorder, for which pharmacological intervention is currently the common therapeutic approach.
成功的行动控制需要有能力关注环境中的相关感觉信号。然而，当不同的感觉输入争夺大脑有限的资源时，这可能会变得复杂。在这种情况下，感觉过程会与自上而下的注意力相互作用，以选择性地处理与目标相关的刺激，同时抑制不相关或分散注意力的感觉信号。在目前的研究中，我们旨在提供关于前额叶区域是否以及如何参与解决注意知觉冲突的因果机制见解。为此，我们应用了 atDCS 并检查了选择性听觉感知的神经生理过程。为了评估 atDCS 是否会对冲突解决过程中涉及的混合神经生理子过程产生不同的影响，我们使用残差迭代分解（RIDE）对 EEG 数据进行了分解。我们表明，右侧前额叶区域与解决注意知觉冲突有关，并且 atDCS 可以增强这种作用。数据表明，可分离的神经生理信号受到 atDCS 的特定影响。涉及抑制竞争刺激和反应评估的冲突解决过程与右额中回（BA46）有关，似乎在解决注意知觉冲突期间，atDCS 会使其加强。刺激后，早期的刺激处理水平也不太容易受到感觉冲突的影响，但这本身并不能解释与 atDCS 相关的行为效果增强。这些观察到的效果可能反映了神经元增益控制机制的变化。总之，这项研究的结果可能对治疗注意力过度活跃障碍具有意义，目前药物干预是这种疾病的常见治疗方法。
