Risk-taking behaviour is an essential aspect of our interactions with the environment. Here we investigated whether vestibular inputs influence behavioural measurement risk-taking propensity. We have combined bipolar Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation (GVS) a well-known and established task, namely Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART). A sham stimulation was used to control for non-specific effects. ...

Objective: Recent studies on treating obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) have investigated noninvasive brain stimulation techniques such as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to improve patients’ impaired emotion and cognition. However, such experiments have yielded mixed results, especially with respect to cognition. This study aimed to investigate whethe...

OBJECTIVES Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has demonstrated some efficacy in treatment-resistant major depression (TRD). The majority of previous controlled studies have used anodal stimulation to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and a control location such as the supraorbital region for the cathode. Several open-label studies have suggested effectiveness from anod...

Previous neurobiological and neuropsychological investigations have shown that risk-taking behaviors and addictions share many structural and functional aspects. In particular, both are characterized by an irresistible need to obtain immediate rewards and by specific alterations in brain circuits responsible for such behaviors. In this study, we used transcranial direct-current stimulation over...

Recent evidence has supported the notion that the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) and the sympatho-adreno-medullary (SAM) systems are modulated by cortical structures such as the prefrontal cortex. This top-down modulation may play a major role in the neuroendocrine changes associated with stressful events. We aimed to investigate further this hypothesis by modulating directly prefrontal c...

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) can up- and down-regulate cortical excitability depending on current direction, however our abilities to measure brain-tissue effects of the stimulation and its after-effects have been limited so far. We used regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF), a surrogate measure of brain activity, to examine regional brain-tissue and brain-network effects during...

Multisensory interactions can produce analgesic effects. In particular, viewing one's own body reduces pain levels, perhaps because of changes in connectivity between visual areas specialized for body representation, and sensory areas underlying pain perception. We tested the causal role of the extrastriate visual cortex in triggering visually induced analgesia by modulating the excitability of...

BACKGROUND Functional neuroimaging studies have shown that specific brain areas are associated with alcohol craving including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). We tested whether modulation of DLPFC using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) could alter alcohol craving in patients with alcohol dependence while being exposed to alcohol cues. METHODS We performed a randomized...

Objectives: Parkinson’s disease (PD) has been associated with impaired motor sequence learning (also known as procedural learning). In the current study, we determined the potential of anodal transcranial direct current stimulation delivered over the primary motor cortex to promote the acquisition of sequential movement in a large sample of patients with idiopathic PD and matched controls. Meth...

Motor cortex transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been shown to enhance motor learning in healthy adults as well as various neurological conditions. However, there has been limited data on whether tDCS enhances jaw motor performance during different oral behaviors such as speech, maximum syllable repetition, and chewing. Because the effects of anodal and cathodal stimulation are k...