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TMS applied to V1 can facilitate reasoning

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Abstract

Visual mental imagery is the subjective experience of seeing objects or events in front of the ‘inner eye’, although they are not actually present. Previous research indicates that (1) visual images help to remember what has been experienced in the past or when objects need to be inspected or manipulated, and (2) visual images are correlated with neural activity in early visual cortices, demonstrating a possible overlap between visual imagery and visual perception. However, recent research revealed that visual imagery can also disrupt cognitive processes and impede thinking. In this transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) experiment, participants had to solve relational reasoning problems that varied in their imageability (easy or difficult to visualize as a mental image). While solving the problems, eight 10 Hz pulses were either applied to primary visual cortex (V1) or a control site (Vertex). Our findings suggest a causal link between mental imagery, primary visual cortex, and reasoning with visual problems. Moreover, participants exhibited much lower error rates when TMS was applied to V1. We conclude that the disruption of visual images in primary visual cortex can facilitate reasoning.

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Notes

  1. In Sack et al. (2009) a power analyses revealed that in the fMRI-guided neuronavigation approach n = 5 participants are sufficient to reveal a significant behavioral effect; this number of necessary participants increases to n = 9 when employing MRI-guided neuronavigation—that is what we use in our experiment with a final sample of N = 10—it increases to n = 13 in case of TMS based on group Talairach coordinates, and to n = 47 with even weaker localization methods. The tasks were different from ours, but the results show that the number of participants in our study is sufficient for TMS studies in which MRI-guided neuronavigation is used for TMS coil positioning.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) with a Grant to MR within the Priority Program “New Frameworks of Rationality” (SPP1516) RA 1934/2-1, a Heisenberg-fellowship RA 1934/3-1, and the BrainLinks-BrainTools Cluster of Excellence funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG, Grant Number EXC 1086). MK’s research was supported by the DFG by Grant Kn 465/6-2. We thank the two anonymous reviewers for many helpful comments, and Julia Wertheim for proof-reading an earlier draft of the manuscript.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Giessen, Otto-Behaghel-Str. 10F, 35394, Giessen, Germany

    Kai Hamburger, Marco Ragni, Harun Karimpur, Florian Wedell & Markus Knauff

  2. Cognitive Computation Lab, University of Freiburg, Georges-Köhler-Allee 52, 79110, Freiburg, Germany

    Marco Ragni & Imke Franzmeier

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Hamburger, K., Ragni, M., Karimpur, H. et al. TMS applied to V1 can facilitate reasoning. Exp Brain Res 236, 2277–2286 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-018-5296-1

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