Executive and Arousal Vigilance: A tDCS study

LUNA, FERNANDO GABRIEL; BARTTFELD, PABLO; JUAN LUPIÁÑEZ; MARTÍN-ARÉVALO, ELISA; ROMÁN-CABALLERO, RAFAEL

Madrid

Congreso; First Joint Congress of the SEPEX, SEPNECA and AIP experimental; 2018

The current work aimed at finding further evidence dissociating two different components of vigilance ? the human ability of sustaining attention for extended periods of time. While one of these components (executive vigilance) implicate an executive and goal-directed behavior, and its decrement over time is usually observed as a decline in detecting infrequent but critical events, the other component (arousal vigilance) is mainly involved in sustaining a tonic arousal level, and its decrement corresponds to an increment in reaction time, especially its trial-to-trial intraindividual variability (IIV). Using a High-Definition Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) procedure, we conducted an exploratory study, stimulating different brain regions over the right fronto-parietal attentional network. Participants (n= 90) were randomly assigned to one of three groups (frontal stimulation, parietal stimulation, and sham condition). All of them performed ? in combination with the tDCS protocol ? an attentional networks task (ANTI-Vea) that assesses simultaneously both vigilance's components, together with three typical attentional functions: phasic alertness, orienting, and executive control. We expected to observe differential modulations over the functioning of both vigilance's components depending on the tDCS group. We will discuss the results obtained and will propose further experiments to dissociate vigilance components.