We examine the effect of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of right superior temporal sulcus (rSTS) in memorization of approach/avoidance relationship-action sentences; for example, “Alejandro accepted/rejected Marta in his group.” Sixty-five university students participated in a tDCS study, in which a between-subjects design was adopted. Sixty-four participants were also given the behavioral approach system (BAS) and behavioral inhibition system (BIS) scales. Participants were subjected to 20 min of stimulation: anodal (N = 24), cathodal (N = 21), or sham (N = 20); subsequently, they were given a list of 40 sentences (half approach and half avoidance) and told to try to memorize them. Finally, they performed a changed/same memory task (half the sentences were the “same” and half were “changed”). Previously, we had examined performance in the memory task without tDCS with another group of participants (N = 20). We found that anodal stimulation improved d’ index of discriminability (hits-false alarms) compared to sham and cathodal conditions for both approach and avoidance sentences. Moreover, the comparison between anodal and task-alone performance showed that stimulation improved d’ index of approach sentences more, as task-alone performance showed better discrimination for avoidance than for approach. Likewise, we explored a potential modulation of tDCS effect by (BAS) and (BIS) traits. We found that d’ index improvement in anodal stimulation condition only benefited low BAS and low BIS participants. Implications of these results are discussed in the context of rSTS function in encoding and memorizing verbally described intentional relationship-actions and the role of individual differences on modulating tDCS effect.

中文翻译：

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通过颞上沟经颅直流电刺激增强关系行动的记忆。

我们研究了右上颞沟（rSTS）的经颅直流电刺激（tDCS）在记忆接近/避免关系-动作句子中的作用；例如，“亚历杭德罗在小组中接受/拒绝了玛塔。” 65名大学生参加了tDCS研究，该研究采用了受试者间设计。六十四名参与者还被给予了行为接近系统（BAS）和行为抑制系统（BIS）量表。参与者受到20分钟的刺激：阳极（N = 24），阴极（N = 21）或假（N = 20）；随后，他们得到了40个句子的列表（半进场和半回避），并被要求尝试记住它们。最后，他们执行了更改/相同的记忆任务（一半句子是“相同”，一半是“改变”）。先前，我们已经与另一组参与者（N = 20）一起检查了没有tDCS的记忆任务的表现。我们发现阳极刺激得到改善d'辨别力指数（命中率错误警报）与进场和回避语句的假和阴极条件相比。此外，阳极性能和单独任务性能之间的比较表明，刺激对进近句子的d'指数的改善更大，因为单独任务性能对回避的区分比对进近的区分更好。同样，我们探索了（BAS）和（BIS）性状对tDCS效应的潜在调节作用。我们发现，阳极刺激条件下的d'指数改善仅使低BAS和低BIS参与者受益。这些结果的含义在rSTS功能的上下文中进行了讨论，这些功能用于编码和记忆口头描述的故意关系行为以及个体差异对tDCS效果的调节作用。