Signal in the Noise? The Effect of Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation on Contrast Perception

A longstanding question in studies of cortical stimulation has been how does stimulation affect brain functioning and cognition, and what are its mechanisms of action. Brain stimulation has been traditionally seen either as a disrupting intervention or as a procedure to enhance cortical excitability and promote improvement in various modality from motor to visual performance. In vision, several hypotheses have been proposed and many experimental paradigms have been used to study how transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and direct current stimulation, particularly transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS) affect visual discrimination. Psychophysical paradigms are particularly useful to measure visual performance, whereby a stimulus is progressively changed from easy to difficult to perceive it, and accuracy threshold can be measured by titrating the stimulus discriminability. Stimuli that vary in contrast are typically used to study low-level visual functions and it is well known that neurons within the early visual areas in the brain, and primarily V1, are tuned to stimuli involved in contrast discrimination. Here we used an orientation discrimination task to study changes in contrast detection by varying stimulus contrast across different levels (Experiment 1, Chapter 2). We used neuro-navigated single-pulse TMS at different intensities to determine whether behavioral response changed linearly as a function of stimulus discriminability independently of TMSintensity, or whether TMS affected behavior depending on TMS intensity and contrast level. Moreover, we tested whether TMS had an effect selective for the field contralateral to stimulation or whether effects could be seen across the entire visual field. Single pulse TMS was delivered to left V1 while participants performed a 2-alternative forced choice orientation discrimination (OD) of one of two Gabor patches presented on either side of fixation at 5 contrast levels and 4 TMS intensities. Participants' performance on OD increased at all contrast levels in the right visual field (contralateral to stimulation) at 80% of phosphene thresholds (PT, individually measured at baseline). Furthermore, when TMS was delivered at 60% of PT, we found improved performance in the right visual field that was selective for the medium contrast, while performance increased at the highest contrast irrespective of TMS intensity, in the field ipsilateral to stimulation, thus both visual fields were affected by TMS, albeit differently. Since the improvement effects might be explained as the result of added noise to the system that paradoxically improves performance for justbelow threshold stimuli (middle contrasts), in Experiments 1 and 2 (Chapter 3) we used transcranial random noise stimulation, a neuromodulation procedure known to enhance cortical excitability when delivered at high frequencies, to further test the hypothesis that brain stimulation might work through a mechanism of stochastic resonance, whereby adding noise to a nonlinear system, the brain in our case, might paradoxically promote better performance by enhancing stimulus discriminability. This might happen only for selective stimulus intensities and stimulation strength. Based on previous successful work, we tested contrast discrimination changes as a function of four different tRNS low intensity levels of stimulation, and we found a decrease in performance selective for the condition with subthreshold stimuli and at .750 mA stimulation intensity. This result might indicate that low intensity stimulation is not enough to promote enhancement of stimuli under the stochastic mechanism effect, thereby suggesting that higher ranges of stimulation are necessary to create the optimal conditions for improvement.