Neuroplasticity of attention: How brain stimulation and mental fatigue affect attentional performance
These are the source files for the PhD thesis of Leon Reteig. View the html and pdf version at https://lcreteig.github.io/thesis.
- Institution: Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam
- Advisors:
- Prof. Dr. Heleen A. Slagter
- Prof. Dr. K. Richard Ridderinkhof
- Defense date: 20 November 2019
Attention allows us to focus on what is relevant and to ignore what is not. While we call upon attention at every waking moment, it is not static: we cannot sustain attention indefinitely, and often fall prey to distractions. This PhD thesis is a study of the short-term neuroplasticity of attentional processes: how susceptible is attention to change, and what processes in the brain (neuro-) give rise to changes in attention (-plasticity)? In Chapters 2–5, I examined whether attention can be improved with electrical stimulation of the brain, in the form of transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS). Previous studies that attempted to use tDCS to enhance attention have yielded promising, but inconsistent results (reviewed in Chapter 2). My attempt to enhance spatial attention with tDCS (Chapter 3) was unsuccessful, as stimulation of the frontal eye fields did not lead to changes in eye movements. Applying tDCS over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex also did not enhance temporal attention (Chapters 4 and 5), as participants’ performance on an attentional blink task remained unchanged. In Chapter 6, I investigated the opposite effect: decreases in attention, when attention has to be sustained for a long time. Using EEG, I tracked whether similar decreases occurred in different attention-related signals in the brain. tDCS may one day be used to counteract these declines, or to relieve other deficits in attention. However, barring a deeper understanding of the technique and more large-scale studies of its efficacy, such practical applications of tDCS are not yet feasible.
Reteig, L. C., Talsma, L. J., van Schouwenburg, M. R., & Slagter, H. A. (2017). Transcranial Electrical Stimulation as a Tool to Enhance Attention. Journal of Cognitive Enhancement, 1, 10–25. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41465-017-0010-y
| Materials | Open Science Framework |
Reteig, L. C., Knapen, T., Roelofs, F. J. F. W., Ridderinkhof, K. R., & Slagter, H. A. (2018). No evidence that frontal eye field tDCS affects latency or accuracy of prosaccades. Frontiers in Neuroscience 12:617. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2018.00617
| Project website | https://lcreteig.github.io/sacc-tDCS |
| Data | figshare |
| Code | GitHub |
| Materials | OSF |
Reteig, L. C., Newman, L. A., Ridderinkhof, K. R., & Slagter, H. A. (n.d.). Effects of tDCS on the attentional blink revisited: A statistical evaluation of a replication attempt.
| Project website | https://lcreteig.github.io/AB-tDCS |
| Behavioral data | OSF |
| EEG data | OpenNeuro |
| Code | GitHub |
| Materials | OSF |
Reteig, L. C., Newman, L. A., Ridderinkhof, K. R., & Slagter, H. A. (n.d.). Spontaneous eye blink rate does not predict attentional blink size, nor the effects of tDCS on attentional blink size.
| Project website | https://lcreteig.github.io/AB_tDCS-sEBR |
| Data | OSF |
| Code | OSF |
| Materials | OSF |
Reteig, L. C., van den Brink, R. L., Prinssen, S., Cohen, M. X., & Slagter, H. A. (2019). Sustaining attention for a prolonged period of time increases temporal variability in cortical responses. Cortex, 117, 16–32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2019.02.016
| Project website | https://lcreteig.github.io/MFBrain |
| Data | OSF |
| Code | OSF |
| Materials | OSF |
- Click on
Clone or download>Download ZIPand download and unzip the files. Or just clone the repository:
git clone https://github.com/lcreteig/thesis-
I’d recommend to open the
thesis.Rprojfile using RStudio. If you’re not using RStudio, you’ll need another means to run the R code, set your working directory to the root of the/thesisfolder, and you’ll also need an installation ofpandoc -
Install the required R packages if you don’t have them:
# from CRAN
install.packages(c("tidyverse", "pander", "kableExtra"))
# from GitHub
if (!require("devtools")) install.packages("devtools", repos = "http://cran.rstudio.org")
remotes::install_github("rstudio/bookdown")
remotes::install_github("crsh/papaja")- If you want to recreate the
pdfversion of the thesis, you’ll also need a LaTeX distribution. If you don’t have one yet, I recommend TinyTex. It’s quite a miminal distribution, but while rendering the book it will automatically install any extra LaTeX packages you might need. To install TinyTex through R:
install.packages('tinytex')
tinytex::install_tinytex()
tinytex:::is_tinytex() # after restarting RStudio, confirm that the LaTeX distribution is now available:
tinytex::tlmgr_install("hyphen-dutch") # install package to work with Dutch text (tinytex will not auto-detect this)The pdf is typeset with the “Helvetica” and “Minion Pro” typefaces. They
are commercial fonts, and so cannot be distributed here. If you don’t
have these fonts installed on your system, make sure to delete lines
27–32 in tex/preamble.tex:
%% Typefaces
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Minion Pro}
\setsansfont[Ligatures=TeX]{Helvetica}
\setmathsfont(Digits,Greek,Latin)[Numbers={Proportional}]{Minion Pro}
\setmathrm{Minion Pro}- If using RStudio, click “Build Book” from the “Build” pane. Select
bookdown::gitbookto create the html version,bookdown::pdf_bookto create the pdf version, or “All Formats” to build both. If not using RStudio, run the following code:
bookdown::render_book("index.Rmd", "bookdown::gitbook") # html version
bookdown::render_book("index.Rmd", "bookdown::pdf_book") # PDF version- If not done automatically, navigate to the newly created
_bookfolder, and open theindex.htmlfile in a browser to view the html version, orthesis.pdfto view the pdf version.
.
├── 01-introduction.Rmd
├── 02-review.Rmd
├── 03-sacc_tDCS.Rmd
├── 04-AB_tDCS.Rmd
├── 05-AB_sEBR.Rmd
├── 06-MFBrain.Rmd
├── 07-summary_discussion.Rmd
├── 08-sacc_tDCS_supplement.Rmd
├── 09-AB_tDCS_supplement.Rmd
├── 10-MFBrain-supplement.Rmd
├── 11-resources-supplement.Rmd
├── 12-references.Rmd
├── 13-contributions.Rmd
├── 14-publications.Rmd
├── 15-dutch_summary.Rmd
├── 16-acknowledgments.Rmd
├── DESCRIPTION
├── README.md
├── _00-preface.Rmd
├── _README.Rmd
├── _bookdown.yml
├── _output.yml
├── index.Rmd
├── thesis.Rproj
├── thesis.log
└── thesis.rds
- Each
.Rmdfile contains the content of one thesis chapter, written in (R)Markdown. The chapters are rendered in order according to the number the file starts with (_00-preface.Rmdis an exception; it’s included only in thehtmlversion of the thesis, before the introduction) DESCRIPTIONlists the R packages that are required to build the thesis (underImports:)_bookdown.yml,index.Rmd, and_output.ymlcontain parameters in the YAML header forbookdownto render the bookthesis.Rprojcan be used to open the project in R Studio
_bookdown_files
├── AB_sEBR_files
│ ├── AB_sEBR.RData
│ └── figures
├── AB_tDCS_files
│ ├── AB_tDCS.RData
│ ├── AB_tDCS_supplement.RData
│ └── figures
├── CC-BY.png
├── MFBrain_files
│ └── figures
├── introduction_files
│ └── figures
├── sacc_tDCS_files
│ ├── FEF_coords_MNI_excl.csv
│ ├── figures
│ └── tdcs_sensations.csv
└── tDCS_att_review_files
├── other.csv
├── spatial_bias.csv
├── spatial_orienting.csv
├── sustained_attention.csv
└── visual_search.csv
Chapters 1–6 (as well as the supplements that correspond to these chapters) contain more than just prose, but also tables, figures, and statistical results. The files necessary to create these live here.
.csvfiles are read in to produce tables- the
/figuresfolders contains the figures inpdf(forpdfversion of the thesis) andpng(forhtmlversion of the thesis) format. - the
.Rdatafiles contain variables from the scripts that produced the statistical results. Their values are inserted into the text in the apppropriate place
.
├── bib
│ ├── apa.csl
│ ├── r-packages.bib
│ └── thesis.bib
├── cover
│ ├── thesis_cover.jpg
│ └── thesis_cover.pdf
├── css
│ └── style.css
└── tex
├── front_matter.tex
└── preamble.tex
/bibcontains everything needed to rendered the bibliopgraphy: information on the cited works (thesis.bib) and R packages (r-packages.bib), as well as a style file to format the biblipgraphy in APA style (apa.csl)/covercontains the book cover/csscontains a style file to render thehtmlversion of the thesis/texcontains two files with LaTeX commands, used to set options (preamble.tex) and create everything prior to the first chapter (front_matter.tex) for thepdfversion of the thesis
All the text and figures are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), except for the art on the cover, which is by Alicia Martin Lopez ©. There’s barely any code in this repository, other than some html and LaTeX formatting; feel free to use those however you see fit.