Stimulating stopping? Investigating the effects of tDCS over the inferior frontal gyri and visual cortices.

Abstract

The ability to cancel an already initiated response is central to flexible behavior. While several different behavioral and neural markers have been suggested to quantify the latency of the stopping process, it remains unclear if they quantify the stopping process itself, or other supporting mechanisms such as visual and/or attentional processing. The present study sought to investigate the contributions of inhibitory and sensory processes to stopping latency markers by combining transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), electroencephalography (EEG) and electromyography (EMG) recordings in a within-subject design. Active and sham tDCS were applied over the inferior frontal gyri (IFG) and visual cortices (VC), combined with both online and offline EEG and EMG recordings. We found evidence that neither of the active tDCS condition affected stopping latencies relative to sham stimulation. Our results challenge previous findings suggesting that anodal tDCS over the IFG can reduce stopping latency and demonstrates the necessity of adequate control conditions in tDCS research. Additionally, while the different putative markers of stopping latency showed generally positive correlations with each other, they also showed substantial variation in the estimated latency of inhibition, making it unlikely that they all capture the same construct exclusively.