HD-tDCS in a Gaming Setting: Effects of Polarity and Timing in a Visuospatial Working-Memory Task
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Visuospatial working memory is essential to everyday functioning, for example, when navigating the natural world and for complex everyday tasks like driving. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is associated with visuospatial working memory and the present study is aimed at investigating the impact of activity modulation in the DLPFC on performance in a gaming setting with high visuospatial working memory demands. In order to influence the activation in the DLPFC, we used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). Understanding working memory and the connected brain regions is relevant for improved cognitive functioning through cognitive enhancement in a wide variety of applications. N = 26 participants participated in a sham-controlled high-definition tDCS (HD-tDCS) study fully crossing polarity (anodal vs. cathodal) and stimulation timing (offline vs. online) within-subjects. In each session, a participant’s visuospatial working memory performance in a gaming setting was measured twice using a research game akin to the Super Hexagon game (Cavanagh, 2012). No significant polarity or timing effects were found for either of the variables tested. These results contribute to the understanding under which conditions cognitive enhancement may be viable in practice (e.g., to enhance learning, e-sports performance, or driving).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".