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Application of anodal tDCS at primary motor cortex immediately after practice of a motor sequence does not improve offline gain

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Abstract

Tecchio et al. (J Neurophysiology 104: 1134–1140, 2010) reported that the application of anodal tDCS at primary motor cortex (M1) immediately after practice of a procedural motor skill enhanced consolidation, which in turn improved offline gain. Tecchio et al. noted, however, that this study did not account for known after-effects associated with this form of non-invasive stimulation. The present study was designed to explicitly reevaluate Tecchio et al.’s claim. As in the original study, individuals experienced either anodal or sham stimulation at M1 after practice of a serial reaction time task (SRTT) followed by test trials 15-min later. Two additional novel conditions experienced the test trials after 120-min rather than 15-min thus allowing potential stimulation after-effects to dissipate. The expectation was that if anodal stimulation influences post-practice consolidation leading to offline gain, this effect would be present not only at 15-min but also after 120-min. In agreement with the working hypothesis, findings revealed offline gain at both 15-min and the longer 2-h time period. Unexpectedly, we found no interaction between real and sham conditions. The lack of difference between Real and Sham effects weakens confidence in the potential of post-practice tDCS for consolidation enhancement, while it is more consistent with other claims that decoupling practice and anodal tDCS stimulation in time can reduce the effectiveness of exogenous stimulation for procedural skill gain.

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Notes

  1. The distributions for mean RT from the training and test data were not normally distributed. For this reason the median RT for each training and test block was considered a more suitable performance measure for all the reported analyses.

  2. Minus values for the normalized data used for these analyses reflects superior performance for the trained sequence compared to the random sequence.

  3. We appreciate an anonymous reviewer noting the feedback protocol difference between the represent study and that of Tecchio et al. (2010) and the potential implications for the current findings.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Kinesiology, Texas A&M University-Texarkana, Texarkana, TX, USA

    Jing Chen

  2. Department of Physical Education, Shanghai University of Finance & Economics, Shanghai, China

    Jing Chen

  3. Department of Health and Kinesiology, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, 77843-4243, USA

    Austin McCulloch, Hakjoo Kim, Taewon Kim, Willem B. Verwey, John J. Buchanan & David L. Wright

  4. Department of Psychology, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Willem B. Verwey

  5. School of Public Health, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

    Joohyun Rhee

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  1. Jing Chen
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  2. Austin McCulloch
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  3. Hakjoo Kim
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  4. Taewon Kim
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Correspondence to David L. Wright.

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Communicated by John C. Rothwell.

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Chen, J., McCulloch, A., Kim, H. et al. Application of anodal tDCS at primary motor cortex immediately after practice of a motor sequence does not improve offline gain. Exp Brain Res 238, 29–37 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-019-05697-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-019-05697-7

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