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Assessing the effects of tDCS over a delayed response inhibition task by targeting the right inferior frontal gyrus and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

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Abstract

Many situations in our everyday life call for a mechanism deputed to outright stop an ongoing course of action. This behavioral inhibition ability, known as response stopping, is often impaired in psychiatric conditions characterized by impulsivity and poor inhibitory control. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has recently been proposed as a tool for modulating response stopping in such clinical populations, and previous studies in healthy humans have already shown that this noninvasive brain stimulation technique is effectively able to improve response stopping, as measured in a stop-signal task (SST) administered immediately after the stimulation. So far, the right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG) has been the main focus of these attempts to modulate response stopping by the means of noninvasive brain stimulation. However, other cortical areas such as the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (rDLPFC) have been implicated in inhibitory control with other paradigms. In order to provide new insight about the involvement of these areas in response stopping, in the present study, tDCS was delivered to 115 healthy subjects, using five stimulation setups that differed in terms of target area (rIFG or rDLPFC) and polarity of stimulation (anodal, cathodal, or sham). The SST was performed 15 min after the offset of the stimulation. Consistently with previous studies, only anodal stimulation over rIFG induced a reliable, although weak, improvement in the SST, which was specific for response stopping, as it was not mirrored in more general reaction time measures.

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Acknowledgments

Part of this research was funded by grants awarded from the University of Padua to G.G., B.P., and S.M.

Conflict of interest

None of the authors have potential conflicts of interest to be disclosed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Developmental and Social Psychology, University of Padua, Via Venezia, 8, 35131, Padua, Italy

    Davide Francesco Stramaccia, Giulia Sartori, Miriam Braga & Giovanni Galfano

  2. Department of Life Sciences, University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy

    Barbara Penolazzi

  3. Department of General Psychology, University of Padua, Padua, Italy

    Barbara Penolazzi & Sara Mondini

  4. Human Inspired Technology Research Center, University of Padua, Padua, Italy

    Sara Mondini

  5. Casa di Cura Figlie di S. Camillo, Cremona, Italy

    Sara Mondini

  6. Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Padua, Padua, Italy

    Giovanni Galfano

Authors
  1. Davide Francesco Stramaccia
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  2. Barbara Penolazzi
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  3. Giulia Sartori
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  4. Miriam Braga
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  5. Sara Mondini
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  6. Giovanni Galfano
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Correspondence to Giovanni Galfano.

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Stramaccia, D.F., Penolazzi, B., Sartori, G. et al. Assessing the effects of tDCS over a delayed response inhibition task by targeting the right inferior frontal gyrus and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Exp Brain Res 233, 2283–2290 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-015-4297-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-015-4297-6

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