Zapping the brain to enhance sport performance? An umbrella review of the effect of transcranial direct current stimulation on physical performance.

Concepts such as "neurodoping" have contributed to an expansion in the area of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and its impact over physical performance in recent years. This umbrella review examines meta-analyses to evaluate tDCS's impact on exercise performance in healthy individuals. We identified 9 meta-analyses that met our inclusion criteria, encompassing 50 crossover studies and 683 participants.

Time-Based and Event-Based Prospective Memory in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer's Disease Patients: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.

Prospective memory (PM) is the ability to remember to perform planned actions in a future moment and it is of fundamental importance for an independent and autonomous lifestyle from development to late adulthood. Deficits in episodic memory and executive functions, which are involved in PM are characteristic features of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's disease (AD). Considering that the number of older adults is drastically increasing over the next decades, it is of great interest to understand how PM decline in healthy older adults and patients with different degree of cognitive decline.

The ANTI-Vea-UGR Platform: A Free Online Resource to Measure Attentional Networks (Alertness, Orienting, and Executive Control) Functioning and Executive/Arousal Vigilance.

The Attentional Networks Test for Interactions and Vigilance-executive and arousal components (ANTI-Vea) is a computerized task of 32 min duration in the standard format. The task simultaneously assesses the main effects and interactions of the three attentional networks (i.e.

Assessing the Evidential Value of Mental Fatigue and Exercise Research.

It has often been reported that mental exertion, presumably leading to mental fatigue, can negatively affect exercise performance; however, recent findings have questioned the strength of the effect. To further complicate this issue, an overlooked problem might be the presence of publication bias in studies using underpowered designs, which is known to inflate false positive report probability and effect size estimates. Altogether, the presence of bias is likely to reduce the evidential value of the published literature on this topic, although it is unknown to what extent.

An umbrella review of randomized control trials on the effects of physical exercise on cognition.

Extensive research links regular physical exercise to an overall enhancement of cognitive function across the lifespan. Here we assess the causal evidence supporting this relationship in the healthy population, using an umbrella review of meta-analyses limited to randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Despite most of the 24 reviewed meta-analyses reporting a positive overall effect, our assessment reveals evidence of low statistical power in the primary RCTs, selective inclusion of studies, publication bias and large variation in combinations of pre-processing and analytic decisions.

Are there quantitative differences between eye-gaze and arrow cues? A meta-analytic answer to the debate and a call for qualitative differences.

Gaze acts from an early age as a cue to orient attention and, thereafter, to infer our social partners' intentions, thoughts, and emotions. Variants of the attentional orienting paradigm have been used to study the orienting capabilities associated to eye gaze. However, to date, it is still unclear whether this methodology truly assesses "social-specific" processes exclusively involved in attention to eye-gaze or the operation of domain-general attentional processes.

Changes in Response Criterion and Lapse Rate as General Mechanisms of Vigilance Decrement: Commentary on McCarley and Yamani (2021).

Multiple theories have used perceptual sensitivity and response criterion indices to explain the decrements in performance across time on task (i.e., vigilance decrement).

Suggestive but not conclusive: An independent meta-analysis on the auditory benefits of learning to play a musical instrument. Commentary on.

The literature on musical training suggests benefits of this activity on auditory skills (i.e., near transfer) and general cognitive abilities (i.

Target-background segregation in a spatial interference paradigm reveals shared and specific attentional mechanisms triggered by gaze and arrows.

Recent research has found that eye gaze and arrows yield opposite congruency effects in a spatial interference paradigm, arrows eliciting faster responses when their direction is congruent with their position (standard congruency effect), and gaze producing faster reaction times for incongruent conditions (reversed congruency effect). In addition, we observed by serendipity in a previous study that the standard effect with arrows was reduced when the target appeared within a complex background, presumably because of hindered figure-ground segregation. Under the same conditions, the reversed effect with gaze became more negative.

Prospective and retrospective timing in mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease patients: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Performance on timing tasks changes with age. Whether these changes reflect a real "clock" problem due to aging or a secondary effect of the reduced cognitive resources of older adults is still an unsettled question. Research on processing of time in aged populations marked by severe mnemonic and/or attentional deficits, such as patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), may help elucidate the role of cognitive resources in age-related temporal distortions.

A High-Definition tDCS and EEG study on attention and vigilance: Brain stimulation mitigates the executive but not the arousal vigilance decrement.

Attention comprises a wide set of processes such as phasic alertness, orienting, executive control, and the executive (i.e., detecting infrequent targets) and arousal (i.

Attentional networks functioning and vigilance in expert musicians and non-musicians.

Previous literature has shown cognitive improvements related to musical training. Attention is one cognitive aspect in which musicians exhibit improvements compared to non-musicians. However, previous studies show inconsistent results regarding certain attentional processes, suggesting that benefits associated with musical training appear only in some processes.

Are eyes special? Electrophysiological and behavioural evidence for a dissociation between eye-gaze and arrows attentional mechanisms.

It has been proposed that attention triggered by eye-gaze may represent a unique attentional process, different from that triggered by non-social stimuli such as arrows. To investigate this issue, in the present study we compared the temporal dynamics of the conflict processing triggered by eye-gaze and arrow stimuli. We investigated the electrophysiological activity during a task in which participants were required to identify the direction of laterally presented eye-gaze or arrow targets.

Musical practice as an enhancer of cognitive function in healthy aging - A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Aging is accompanied by cognitive decline, although recent research indicates that the rate of decline depends on multiple lifestyle factors. One of such factors is musical practice, an activity that involves several sensory and motor systems and a wide range of high-level cognitive processes. This paper describes the first systematic review and meta-analysis, to our knowledge, of the impact of musical practice on healthy neurocognitive aging.

Arrows don't look at you: Qualitatively different attentional mechanisms triggered by gaze and arrows.

Eye gaze conveys rich information concerning the states of mind of others, playing a critical role in social interactions, signaling internal states, and guiding others' attention. On the basis of its social significance, some researchers have proposed that eye gaze may represent a unique attentional stimulus. However, contrary to this notion, the majority of the literature has shown indistinguishable attentional effects when eye gaze and arrows have been used as cues.