NCT06344559

Brain Criticality, Oculomotor Control, and Cognitive Effort

Theta-burst Stimulation Modulates Criticality and Cognitive Control

• Status: Recruiting
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 60 (estimated)
• Sponsor: Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 45 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

The project examines electroencephalography, MRI, and behavioral measures indexing flexibility (critical state dynamics) in the brain when healthy young adults do demanding cognitive tasks, and in response to transcranial magnetic stimulation.

Detailed description

The healthy human brain is a complex, dynamical system which is hypothesized to operate, at rest, near a phase transition - at the boundary between order and chaos. Proximity to this critical point is functionally adaptive as it affords maximal flexibility, dynamic range, and information transmission capacity, with implications for short term memory and cognitive control. Divergence from this critical point has become correlated with diverse forms of psychopathology and neuropathy suggesting that distance from a critical point is both a potential biomarker of disorder and also a target for intervention in disordered brains. The Investigators have further hypothesized that task performance depends on how closely brains operate to criticality during task performance and also that subjective cognitive effort is a reflection of divergence from criticality, induced by engagement with demanding tasks. A key control parameter determining distance from criticality in a resting brain is hypothesized to be the balance of cortical excitation to inhibition (the "E/I balance"). Transcranial magnetic stimulation is a widely used experimental and clinical tool for neuromodulation and theta-burst stimulation (TBS) protocols are thought to modulate the E/I balance. Here the Investigators test whether cortical dynamics can be systematically modulated away from the critical point with continuous theta-burst stimulation (cTBS) and intermittent theta-burst stimulation (iTBS), which is thought to decrease and increase E/I balance, respectively. Depending on baseline E/I balance prior to stimulation, this will make people's brains either operate closer to, or farther away from critiality and thereby impact on cognitive control and subjective cognitive effort during performance of control-demanding tasks.

Conditions

• Healthy

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
DEVICE	transcranial magnetic stimulation	The study intervention involves modulation of cortical excitation to inhibition (E/I) balance in the right frontal eye field (FEF) by means of 2 trains of spaced continuous or intermittent theta burst stimulation (cTBS, iTBS, respectively) using a transcranial magnetic stimulation device. The endpoint of this stimulation will be a decrease (cTBS) or increase (iTBS) in the local E/I ratio that should last at least 60 minutes post-stimulation (Chung et al., 2016). In separate sessions, all participants will receive either active or stimulation to the FEF. The Investigators will contrast the effects of both iTBS and cTBS to sham stimulation and to each other.

Timeline

• Start date: 2024-08-01
• Primary completion: 2026-06-01
• Completion: 2026-06-01
• First posted: 2024-04-03
• Last updated: 2024-08-07

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States

Regulatory

• FDA-regulated device study