tDCS of prefrontal cortex improves multitasking
-
1
The University of Queensland, School of Psychology, Australia
-
2
The University of Queensland, School of Psychology; Queensland Brain Institute, Australia
Making two decisions simultaneously typically leads to substantial performance impairments. Such impairments are thought to reflect a bottleneck in the mapping of sensory information to motor responses (Pashler, 1984, 1994; Welford, 1952). Brain imaging studies have implicated the left posterior lateral prefrontal cortex (pLPFC) in response selection processes using single-task, dual-task and training paradigms (Dux et al., 2006, 2009; Ivanoff et al., 2009). More recently, a study using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) showed that the left posterior lateral prefrontal cortex (pLPFC) is causally involved in single-task response selection (Filmer et al., 2013). As yet, however, there is no causal evidence to implicate the left pLPFC in dual-task performance. Here, we used tDCS to test whether the left pLPFC is causally involved in completing two temporally overlapping tasks. Participants completed three sessions, and received nine minutes of anodal, cathodal, or sham stimulation in each. The behavioural paradigm consisted of two tasks, one auditory and one visual. Participants completed a mixture of single- and dual-task trials, where a sound, or an image, or both were presented. Participants responded to the relevant stimuli as quickly and accurately as possible in each of three sessions: before stimulation, immediately after stimulation, and 20 minutes later. For the single-task trials, both anodal and cathodal stimulation disrupted RTs, in line with the findings of Filmer et al. (2013). For the dual-task trials, however, only cathodal stimulation reduced reaction times immediately following stimulation. This reduction was not found for anodal or sham stimulation. Overall, the results confirm that the left pLPFC is causally involved in the central bottleneck that limits multitasking performance. The findings also suggest that response selection may vary for single- and dual-task responses, indicating a potential dissociation within the left pLPFC.
Keywords:
Prefrontal Cortex,
response selection,
tDCS,
Bottleneck,
dual-task
Conference:
XII International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON-XII), Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, 27 Jul - 31 Jul, 2014.
Presentation Type:
Oral Presentation
Topic:
Attention
Citation:
Filmer
H,
Mattingley
J and
Dux
P
(2015). tDCS of prefrontal cortex improves multitasking.
Conference Abstract:
XII International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON-XII).
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2015.217.00005
Copyright:
The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers.
They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters.
The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated.
Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed.
For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions.
Received:
19 Feb 2015;
Published Online:
24 Apr 2015.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Hannah Filmer, The University of Queensland, School of Psychology, Brisbane, Australia, h.l.filmer@gmail.com