• Zeyi Wang, Bronte N Ficek, Kimberly T Webster, Olivia Herrmann, Constantine E Frangakis, John E Desmond, Chiadi U Onyike, Brian Caffo, Argye E Hillis, and Kyrana Tsapkini.
• Department of Biostatistics, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA.
• Neuromodulation. 2023 Jun 1; 26 (4): 850860850-860.

ObjectivesGeneralization (or near-transfer) effects of an intervention to tasks not explicitly trained are the most desirable intervention outcomes. However, they are rarely reported and even more rarely explained. One hypothesis for generalization effects is that the tasks improved share the same brain function/computation with the intervention task. We tested this hypothesis in this study of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) that is claimed to be involved in selective semantic retrieval of information from the temporal lobes.Materials And MethodsIn this study, we examined whether tDCS over the left IFG in a group of patients with primary progressive aphasia (PPA), paired with a lexical/semantic retrieval intervention (oral and written naming), may specifically improve semantic fluency, a nontrained near-transfer task that relies on selective semantic retrieval, in patients with PPA.ResultsSemantic fluency improved significantly more in the active tDCS than in the sham tDCS condition immediately after and two weeks after treatment. This improvement was marginally significant two months after treatment. We also found that the active tDCS effect was specific to tasks that require this IFG computation (selective semantic retrieval) but not to other tasks that may require different computations of the frontal lobes.ConclusionsWe provided interventional evidence that the left IFG is critical for selective semantic retrieval, and tDCS over the left IFG may have a near-transfer effect on tasks that depend on the same computation, even if they are not specifically trained.Clinical Trial RegistrationThe Clinicaltrials.gov registration number for the study is NCT02606422.Copyright © 2022 International Neuromodulation Society. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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