A transcranial magnetic stimulation study on the role of the left intraparietal sulcus in temporal orienting of attention

Abstract

Adaptive behavior requires the ability to orient attention to the moment in time at which a relevant event is likely to occur. Temporal orienting of attention has been consistently associated with activation of the left intraparietal sulcus (IPS) in prior fMRI studies. However, a direct test of its causal involvement in temporal orienting is still lacking. The present study tackled this issue by transiently perturbing left IPS activity with either online (Experiment 1) or offline (Experiment 2) transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). In both experiments, participants performed a temporal orienting task, alternating between blocks in which a temporal cue predicted when a subsequent target would appear and blocks in which a neutral cue provided no information about target timing. In Experiment 1 we used an online TMS protocol, aiming to interfere specifically with cue-related temporal processes, whereas in Experiment 2 we employed an offline protocol whereby participants performed the temporal orienting task before and after receiving TMS. The right IPS and/or the vertex were stimulated as active control regions. While results replicated the canonical pattern of temporal orienting effects on reaction time, with faster responses for temporal than neutral trials, these effects were not modulated by TMS over the left IPS (as compared to the right IPS and/or vertex regions) regardless of the online or offline protocol used. Overall, these findings challenge the causal role of the left IPS in temporal orienting of attention inviting further research on its underlying neural substrates.