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Accession Number:
AD1186749
Title:
Using Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) to Modulate Performance during a Multi-Modal Auditory and Visual Vigilance Task
Descriptive Note:
[Technical Report, Technical Report]
Corporate Author:
NAVAL SUBMARINE MEDICAL RESEARCH LAB GROTON CT
Report Date:
2022-11-28
Pagination or Media Count:
27
Abstract:
Detecting infrequent, low-salience targets is a critical task in many mentally fatiguing jobs, such as sonar monitoring. Vigilance is necessary foroptimal performance on these tasks, as watch shifts can last several hours. The ability to maintain attention over time, i.e. vigilance, can degrade inas little as ten minutes. This decrement is often attributed to limited cognitive resources and the subsequent mental fatigue, and manifests asincreased target misses and longer reaction times. Transcranial direct current stimulation tDCS may serve as a countermeasure to vigilancedecrement. Research shows that tDCS to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex DLPFC can be used to improve performance on visually-basedvigilance tasks, but the use of tDCS for auditory or multisensory visual and auditory vigilance tasks has been underexplored. We investigated theeffectiveness of tDCS to the DLPFC for improving vigilance on visual-only, auditory-only, and multimodal auditory-visual vigilance tasks. Resultsindicate that anodal tDCS improved visual response times, but stimulation also decreased auditory sensitivity and specificity. For the multimodalauditory-visual vigilance task, the effects of anodal tDCS were not significantly different from sham tDCS, revealing differential effects of anodaltDCS on varying task modalities and outcome measures.
Distribution Statement:
[A, Approved For Public Release]
