Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation over the left parietal cortex facilitates visual search for a letter among its mirror images》.pdf

Neuropsychologia 70 (2015) 196–205 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Neuropsychologia journal homepage: /locate/neuropsychologia Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation over the left parietal cortex facilitates visual search for a letter among its mirror images Giuseppa Renata Mangano a,n, Massimiliano Oliveri a,b, Patrizia Turriziani a, Daniela Smirni a, Li Zhaoping c, Lisa Cipolotti a,d a Dipartimento di Scienze Psicologiche Pedagogiche e della Formazione, Università di Palermo, Edifi cio 15, 90128 Palermo, Italy b Fondazione Santa Lucia IRCCS, Rome, Italy c Department of Computer Science, University College, London, United Kingdom d Department of Neuropsychology, National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square, London, United Kingdom a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Article history: Interference by task irrelevant information is seen in visual search paradigms using letters. Thus, it is Received 9 October 2014 harder to find the letter ‘N’ among its mirror reversals ‘И’ than vice versa. This observation, termed the Received in revised form reversed letter effect, involves both a linguistic association and an interference of task irrelevant in- 25 February 2015 formation — the shape of ‘N’ or ‘И’ is irrelevant, the search requires merely distinguishing the tilts of Accepted 1 March 2015 Available online 3 March 2015 oblique bars. We adapted the repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) methods that we