Sensory gating
Table of contents
Project description
Sensory and sensorimotor gating are phenomena that refer to attenuation of responding to a repeated stimulus. This is thought to reflect the brain's ability to filter out redundant or irrelevant information and prevent their further processing at cortical level. Regarding the neural basis of this, usually thalamic and striatal areas are implicated but some evidence points also towards prefrontal cortical (PFC) areas.
As PFC is intimately connected to several cognitive functions, it could be assumed that stimulating these areas might also affect gating. There is some evidence that stimulation of either prefrontal or task-specific sensory cortical areas might enhance sensory or sensorimotor gating.
We examine the effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) targeted at the dorsolateral PFC in healthy young adults on tasks tapping into sensory (paired click paradigm, CLICK) and sensorimotor gating (pre-pulse inhibition, PPI).
