TMS of Visual Working Memory

Summary

The purpose of this study is to understand how the brain allows individuals to keep information "in mind" over brief intervals. During the experiment, participants will be asked to maintain fixation while they attend to and remember different visual stimuli (e.g., the location of a dot on the screen, the color of a circle, the orientation of a line, the speed of a group of moving dots) on a computer monitor. Participants will make decisions about these visual stimuli and indicate their decisions by pressing buttons or making eye movements. Through the use of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) investigators hope to understand the contributions of different anatomical areas while subjects perform this task.

Conditions

• Occipital Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

Interventions

DEVICE

Sham TMS condition

A sham TMS coil will be used to measure baseline performance on the working memory task. The sham coil looks and sounds just like the real coil, but produces a negligible magnetic field. Following the 40 seconds of sham TBS, the subject will perform the working memory task for 45 minutes.

DEVICE

OffLine TMS Condition

A total of 200 trains will be delivered successively in 40 s, totaling 600 pulses. The pulses will be delivered at 80% of motor thresholds. A sham TMS coil will be used to measure baseline performance on the working memory task. The sham coil looks and sounds just like the real coil, but produces a negligible magnetic field. Following the 40 seconds of TBS, or sham TBS, the subject will perform the working memory task for 45 minutes.

DEVICE

Online TMS condition

A single train of pulses (3 pulses at 50Hz, duration 40ms) will be delivered once during a particular time epoch on each trial, followed by a minimum of 6 seconds of no stimulation. No more than 600 pulses will be applied in a single session. Similar to the offline TMS condition, a sham TMS coil will be used to measure baseline performance on the working memory task. In each session (frontal, sham) subjects will perform the working memory task for 45 minutes.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• NYU Langone Health

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Kartik Sreenivasan · New York University Medical School

Study Design

Allocation

NA

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

NONE

Model

SINGLE_GROUP

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Max Age

65 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2016-11-30

Primary Completion

2018-04-25

Completion

2018-04-25

FDA Device

Yes

Countries

• United States

Study Locations