Effects of tDCS on motor learning and memory formation: a consensus and critical position paper

Abstract

Motor skills are required for activities of daily living. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) applied in association with motor skill learning has been investigated as a tool for enhancing training effects in health and disease. Here, we review the published literature investigating whether tDCS can facilitate the acquisition and retention of motor skills and adaptation. A majority of reports focused on the application of tDCS with the anode placed over the primary motor cortex (M1) during motor skill acquisition, while some evaluated tDCS applied over the cerebellum during adaptation of existing motor skills. Work in multiple laboratories is under way to develop a mechanistic understanding of tDCS effects on different forms of learning and to optimize stimulation protocols. Efforts are required to improve reproducibility and standardization. Overall, reproducibility remains to be fully tested, effect sizes with present techniques are moderate (up to d= 0.5) (Hashemirad, Zoghi, Fitzgerald, & Jaberzadeh, 2016) and the basis of inter-individual variability in tDCS effects is incompletely understood. It is recommended that future studies explicitly state in the Methods the exploratory (hypothesis-generating) or hypothesis-driven (confirmatory) nature of the experimental designs. General research practices could be improved with prospective pre-registration of hypothesis-based investigations, more emphasis on the detailed description of methods (including all pertinent details to enable future modeling of induced current and experimental replication) and use of post-publication open data repositories. A checklist is proposed for reporting tDCS investigations in a way that can improve efforts to assess reproducibility.