TY - JOUR
T1 - Investigating the roles of medial prefrontal and superior temporal cortex in source monitoring
AU - Moseley, Peter
AU - Mitrenga, Kaja Julia
AU - Ellison, Amanda
AU - Fernyhough, Charles
N1 - Copyright © 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.
PY - 2018/11/1
Y1 - 2018/11/1
N2 - Source monitoring, or the ability to recall the origin of information, is a crucial aspect of remembering past experience. One facet of this, reality monitoring, refers to the ability to distinguish between internally generated and externally generated information, biases in which have previously been associated with auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia. Neuroimaging evidence suggests that medial prefrontal and superior temporal (STG) regions may play a role in reality monitoring for auditory verbal information, with evidence from a previous neurostimulation experiment also suggesting that modulation of excitability in STG may affect reality monitoring task performance. Here, two experiments are reported that used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to modulate excitability in medial prefrontal and superior temporal cortex, to further investigate the role of these brain regions in reality monitoring. In the first experiment (N = 36), tDCS was applied during the encoding stage of the task, while in the second experiment, in a separate sample (N = 36), it was applied during the test stage. There was no effect of tDCS compared to a sham condition in either experiment, with Bayesian analysis providing evidence for the null hypothesis in both cases. This suggests that tDCS applied to superior temporal or medial prefrontal regions may not affect reality monitoring performance, and has implications for theoretical models that link reality monitoring to the therapeutic effect of tDCS on auditory verbal hallucinations.
AB - Source monitoring, or the ability to recall the origin of information, is a crucial aspect of remembering past experience. One facet of this, reality monitoring, refers to the ability to distinguish between internally generated and externally generated information, biases in which have previously been associated with auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia. Neuroimaging evidence suggests that medial prefrontal and superior temporal (STG) regions may play a role in reality monitoring for auditory verbal information, with evidence from a previous neurostimulation experiment also suggesting that modulation of excitability in STG may affect reality monitoring task performance. Here, two experiments are reported that used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to modulate excitability in medial prefrontal and superior temporal cortex, to further investigate the role of these brain regions in reality monitoring. In the first experiment (N = 36), tDCS was applied during the encoding stage of the task, while in the second experiment, in a separate sample (N = 36), it was applied during the test stage. There was no effect of tDCS compared to a sham condition in either experiment, with Bayesian analysis providing evidence for the null hypothesis in both cases. This suggests that tDCS applied to superior temporal or medial prefrontal regions may not affect reality monitoring performance, and has implications for theoretical models that link reality monitoring to the therapeutic effect of tDCS on auditory verbal hallucinations.
KW - Adolescent
KW - Adult
KW - Female
KW - Hallucinations/physiopathology
KW - Humans
KW - Male
KW - Mental Recall/physiology
KW - Prefrontal Cortex/physiology
KW - Psycholinguistics
KW - Reading
KW - Speech Perception/physiology
KW - Temporal Lobe/physiology
KW - Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation
KW - Visual Perception/physiology
KW - Young Adult
U2 - 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2018.10.001
DO - 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2018.10.001
M3 - Article
C2 - 30326206
VL - 120
SP - 113
EP - 123
JO - Neuropsychologia
JF - Neuropsychologia
SN - 0028-3932
ER -