Individual Differences and State-Dependent Responses in Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation

Tzu-Yu Hsu, Chi-Hung Juan, Philip Tseng, Tzu-Yu Hsu, Chi-Hung Juan, Philip Tseng

Abstract

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been extensively used to examine whether neural activities can be selectively increased or decreased with manipulations of current polarity. Recently, the field has reevaluated the traditional anodal-increase and cathodal-decrease assumption due to the growing number of mixed findings that report the effects of the opposite directions. Therefore, the directionality of tDCS polarities and how it affects each individual still remain unclear. In this study, we used a visual working memory (VWM) paradigm and systematically manipulated tDCS polarities, types of different independent baseline measures, and task difficulty to investigate how these factors interact to determine the outcome effect of tDCS. We observed that only low-performers, as defined by their no-tDCS corsi block tapping (CBT) performance, persistently showed a decrement in VWM performance after anodal stimulation, whereas no tDCS effect was found when participants were divided by their performance in digit span. In addition, only the optimal level of task difficulty revealed any significant tDCS effect. All these findings were consistent across different blocks, suggesting that the tDCS effect was stable across a short period of time. Lastly, there was a high degree of intra-individual consistency in one's responsiveness to tDCS, namely that participants who showed positive or negative effect to anodal stimulation are also more likely to show the same direction of effects for cathodal stimulation. Together, these findings imply that tDCS effect is interactive and state dependent: task difficulty and consistent individual differences modulate one's responsiveness to tDCS, while researchers' choices of independent behavioral baseline measures can also critically affect how the effect of tDCS is evaluated. These factors together are likely the key contributors to the wide range of "noises" in tDCS effects between individuals, between stimulation protocols, and between different studies in the literature. Future studies using tDCS, and possibly tACS, should take such state-dependent condition in tDCS responsiveness into account.

Keywords: non-invasive brain stimulation; right posterior parietal cortex (rPPC); state-dependence; transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS); visual working memory (VWM).

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Correlation between change detection performance and different independent measures. corsi block tapping (CBT) scores (orange) showed a significant positive correlation with participants’ change detection performance (X-axis), while digit span (gray) did not, suggesting that CBT and digit span tasks are most likely probing different mechanisms of memory.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Individual differences in the directions of tDCS effects in 18 participants (Anodal-sham and Cathodal-sham contrasts). Even in set size 4 where the level of difficulty is optimal, there is still a wide range of individual differences. Interestingly, although differences exists between different individuals (left chart), the directions of tDCS effect is quite consistent within each individual (lower right pie chart).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Mean K values under manipulations of tDCS and set size. Participants were divided into low and high performers by either digit span (top panel) or CBT (bottom panel) scores, and two separate three-way ANOVAs were conducted for each. A significant interaction between tDCS, set size and group was only observed when participants were divided based on their CBT performance, which was driven by lower K values in the anodal tDCS condition than sham and cathodal conditions under set size 6 and 8 in low performers. Asterisks denote p < 0.05, and error bars denote standard error of the mean.

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