What is it about?
This article examines whether transcranial direct current stimulation, or tDCS, can improve reflective thinking — the kind of thinking people use when they pause, question an intuitive answer, and reason through a problem more carefully. We focused on stimulation of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a brain region often linked to cognitive control and decision-making. Participants completed reasoning tasks, including versions of the Cognitive Reflection Test and base-rate reasoning problems, as well as working-memory tasks. Some participants received active stimulation, while others received sham stimulation. The key question was whether stimulation improves judgment and decision-making directly, or whether any improvement is simply due to better working memory.
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Why is it important?
Many everyday decisions require people to resist quick but misleading impressions. For example, in financial, health, legal, or social decisions, the first answer that comes to mind is not always the best one. This study contributes to the debate about whether reflective thinking can be enhanced through non-invasive brain stimulation. The findings suggest that stimulation over the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex can improve some forms of reflective reasoning, particularly tasks involving numerical or probabilistic conflict. Importantly, the improvement was not explained by better working memory updating. This suggests that tDCS may influence aspects of cognitive control or conflict processing that are more specific to reflective judgment and decision-making.
Perspectives
The findings suggest that non-invasive brain stimulation may have potential for enhancing aspects of reflective thinking, especially in situations where people need to override misleading intuitive responses. This could be relevant for future research on decision-making, cognitive control, impulsivity, and behavioural addictions such as gambling or problematic social media use. However, the findings should not be interpreted as showing a general “cognitive enhancement” effect. The benefits were task-specific and did not extend to working-memory updating.
Dr Volker Thoma
University of East London
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Single session and repeated anodal transcranial direct current stimulation over the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex increases reflective thinking but not working memory updating performance, Heliyon, August 2024, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e36078.
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