Mind the stimulation site: Enhancing and diminishing sentence comprehension with anodal tDCS.

Mind the stimulation site: Enhancing and diminishing sentence comprehension with anodal tDCS.
Brain Lang. 2020 Feb 06;204:104757
Authors: Vergallito A, Varoli E, Giustolisi B, Cecchetto C, Del Mauro L, Romero Lauro LJ
Abstract
In a previous sham-controlled study, we showed the feasibility of increasing language comprehension in healthy participants by applying anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (atDCS) over the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG). In the present work, we present a follow-up experiment targeting with atDCS the left inferior parietal cortex (LIPC) while participants performed the same auditory comprehension task used in our previous experiment. Both neural sites (LIFG and LIPC) are crucial hubs of Baddeley's model of verbal short-term memory (vSTM). AtDCS over LIPC decreased accuracy as compared to sham and LIFG stimulation, suggesting the involvement of this area in sentence comprehension. Crucially, our results highlighted that applying tDCS over different hubs of the same neural network can lead to opposite behavioural results, with relevant implications from a clinical perspective.
PMID: 32036293 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

Source: Brain and Language - February 5, 2020 Category: Neurology Authors: Vergallito A, Varoli E, Giustolisi B, Cecchetto C, Del Mauro L, Romero Lauro LJ Tags: Brain Lang Source Type: research