Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In the present study, we combined tDCS and EEG to examine theelectrophysiological responses to the tDCS-induced effects onthe face inversion effect showed in recent studies. A double-blindprocedure with a between-subjects design (n=48) was used withthe subjects, recruited from the student population, beingrandomly assigned to either tDCS anodal or sham condition. ThetDCS stimulation was delivered over the DLPFC at Fp3 site for10 min at an intensity of 1.5mA while subjects engaged in anold/new recognition task traditionally used to obtain theinversion effect. The behavioural results generally confirmedprevious findings. Critically, the results from the N170 show aneffect of tDCS. Specifically, the tDCS procedure was able tomodulate the N170 peak component by reducing the inversioneffect on the latencies (i.e. less delay between upright andinverted faces) and by increasing the inversion effect on theamplitudes (i.e. larger N170 for inverted vs upright faces). Weinterpret the results based on the previous literature in regard tothe inversion effect on the N170 component.