No effect of parietal and frontal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on attention and memory

Dubravac, Mirela; Meier, Beat (30 November 2021). No effect of parietal and frontal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on attention and memory. Brain stimulation, 14(6), p. 1672. Elsevier 10.1016/j.brs.2021.10.266

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Attention at encoding shapes long-term memory: Attended stimuli are better remembered than unattended stimuli. This memory selectivity effect is smaller when attention is switched between different tasks and stimuli, suggesting a tight connection between selective attention and selective memory. In order to investigate the neural substrate of this connection, we stimulated brain areas associated with selective attention during a study phase and tested incidental recognition memory in a subsequent offline test phase. Specifically, we stimulated the superior parietal cortex (associated with the dorsal attentional network), the inferior parietal cortex (associated with the ventral attentional network) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (associated with top-down cognitive control) with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). The study phase consisted of a task switching procedure where pictures and words were presented simultaneously and participants had to switch between a picture and a word categorization task. Memory for attended and unattended stimuli was assessed in a subsequent recognition test. We hypothesized that a relative increase in activity in the dorsal network would boost selective attention while increased activity in the ventral network would impair selective attention, and in consequence, we expected to find corresponding effects on memory: Enhanced selective attention should lead to higher memory selectivity, while impaired selective attention should lead to lower memory selectivity. Our results replicated that task switching reduced memory selectivity. However, we found no significant effects of tDCS. This result is surprising because our study was based on established stimulation protocols. However, they are in line with a growing number of studies that failed to find tDCS effects.

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