Investigating Working Memory Protection using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)

This study uses TMS to investigate the role of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in protecting working memory from visual distractors. This study consists of two sessions. Each session, we ask participants to perform a working memory task while irrelevant information is presented during the memory retention period. The stimulation (continuous theta-burst stimulation, cTBS) lasts for 40 seconds and is applied before participants perform the task. Using TMS, we can investigate if the prefrontal cortex protects memories from upcoming distractors by comparing memory recall accuracy with or without perturbation of activity in this region.

This study has completed data collection. Stay tuned to find out the results!