Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Horoufchin, Houpand
• Worringer, Britta
• Pellicano, Antonello
• Patel, Harshal
• Koch, Iring
• Binkofski, Ferdinand

Titel

Bottleneck-function of the left inferior parietal cortex in dual-tasking revealed by repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation

Ist Teil von

• Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. Supplement, 2013-01, p.132d-132d

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Quelle

EZB Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Previous dual-task studies found activation in the left inferior parietal-cortex that was associated with delayed processing of the second task in dual-tasking. Presumably, this reflects competition for neuronal resources (bottleneck; Sigman & Dehaene, 2008). We hypothesized that a "virtual lesion" induced in the left inferior parietal-cortex will result in decreased performance of the second task. The dual-task in the present study consisted of a colour- (yellow vs. blue) and a shape-discrimination task (triangle vs. circle). We used stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA) of 0ms (strong interference), 300ms (moderate interference), and 900ms (no interference). Two groups were tested. Both first performed a baseline measurement block (no stimulation) and then an experimental block with either transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS group) or sham stimulation (sham group). We used a continuous theta-burst stimulation paradigm (Huang et al., 2005) to induce a "virtual lesion" of the left inferior parietal lobe. Preliminary results (12 participants) already show a significant 3-way interaction between SOA, TMS/sham and block (p<0.05). In the experimental block, the TMS group showed increased dual-task interference in the second task at short SOA relative to the sham group, whereas performance in both groups did not differ in the baseline block. These results reveal a causal relationship between the role of the left inferior parietal cortex and the performance of the second task in dual-tasking. They further corroborate our hypothesis that the inferior parietal region plays a crucial role in the serial processing of dual-tasks, most probably in form of a bottleneck.