Structural and functional MRI evidence for significant contribution of precentral gyrus to flexible oculomotor control: evidence from the antisaccade task.

Antisaccade task requires inhibition of a prepotent prosaccade to a peripheral target and initiation of a saccade to the opposite location, and, therefore, is used as a tool to investigate behavioral adjustment. The frontal and parietal cortices are both known for their activation during saccade generation, but it is unclear whether their neuroanatomical characteristics also contribute to antisaccades. Here, we took antisaccade cost (antisaccade latency minus prosaccade latency) as an index for additional time for generating antisaccades.

Shared and distinct structure-function substrates of heterogenous distractor suppression ability between high and low working memory capacity individuals.

Salient stimuli can capture attention in a bottom-up manner; however, this attentional capture can be suppressed in a top-down manner. It has been shown that individuals with high working memory capacity (WMC) can suppress salient‑but-irrelevant distractors better than those with low WMC; however, neural substrates underlying this difference remain unclear. To examine this, participants with high or low WMC (high-/low-WMC, n = 44/44) performed a visual search task wherein a color singleton item served as a salient distractor, and underwent structural and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scans.

Enhancing Visuospatial Working Memory Performance Using Intermittent Theta-Burst Stimulation Over the Right Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex.

Noninvasive brain stimulation provides a promising approach for the treatment of neuropsychiatric conditions. Despite the increasing research on the facilitatory effects of this kind of stimulation on the cognitive processes, the majority of the studies have used the standard stimulation approaches such as the transcranial direct current stimulation and the conventional repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) which seem to be limited in robustness and the duration of the transient effects. However, a recent specialized type of rTMS, theta-burst stimulation (TBS), patterned to mimic the natural cross-frequency coupling of the human brain, may induce robust and longer-lasting effects on cortical activity.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation over the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex modulates visuospatial distractor suppression.

Visual selective attention allows us to filter relevant inputs from irrelevant inputs during visual processing. In contrast to rich research exploring how the brain facilitates task-relevant inputs, less is known about how the brain suppresses irrelevant inputs. In this study, we used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to investigate the causal role of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), a crucial brain area for attentional control, in distractor suppression.

Dual n-back working memory training evinces superior transfer effects compared to the method of loci.

Working memory (WM) training is a prevalent intervention for multiple cognitive deficits, however, the transfer effects to other cognitive tasks from gains in WM induced by different training techniques still remains controversial. Therefore, the current study recruited three groups of young adults to investigate the memory training transference, with N-back group (NBG) (n = 50) training on dual n-back task, Memory Palace group (MPG) (n = 50) on method of loci, and a blank control group (BCG) (n = 48) receiving no training. Our results showed that both training groups separately improved WM capacity on respective trained task.