Effects of Online Single Pulse Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation on Prefrontal and Parietal Cortices in Deceptive Processing: A Preliminary Study.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was used to test the functional role of parietal and prefrontal cortical regions activated during a playing card Guilty Knowledge Task (GKT). Single-pulse TMS was applied to 15 healthy volunteers at each of three target sites: left and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and midline parietal cortex. TMS pulses were applied at each of five latencies (from 0 to 480 ms) after the onset of a card stimulus. TMS applied to the parietal cortex exerted a latency-specific increase in inverse efficiency score and in reaction time when subjects were instructed to lie relative to when asked to respond with the truth, and this effect was specific to when TMS was applied at 240 ms after stimulus onset. No effects of TMS were detected at left or right DLPFC sites. This manipulation with TMS of performance in a deception task appears to support a critical role for the parietal cortex in intentional false responding, particularly in stimulus selection processes needed to execute a deceptive response in the context of a GKT. However, this interpretation is only preliminary, as further experiments are needed to compare performance within and outside of a deceptive context to clarify the effects of deceptive intent.
Competing Interests: BL, LB, HG, and SL were supported by the NIMH Intramural Research Program (ZIAMH002955). This work was done while BL and SL were at Columbia University, prior to their NIMH employment. SL is an inventor on a patent on TMS technology assigned to Columbia University. SL has received grant support from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, the Stanley Medical Research Foundation, Neosync, Nexstim, NIH, and Brainsway. The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
(Copyright © 2022 Luber, Beynel, Spellman, Gura, Ploesser, Termini and Lisanby.)