Trial reportPsychophysiology2025
The impact of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation on anterior cingulate cortex activity in a cognitive control task.
Trial report in Psychophysiology, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Blue enriched light modulates pupil dilation induced by transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation.Scientific reports · 2025Trial
- The impact of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation on anterior cingulate cortex activity in a cognitive control task.Psychophysiology · 2025Trial
- Article
- Reduced task-induced frontal midline theta activity in chronic stroke patients compared to healthy older adults - An MEG study.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2026Article
- Vagus nerve stimulation: a potential tool to further improve perioperative anesthesia management quality and postoperative recovery?Frontiers in medicine · 2026Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS) offers a non-invasive method to enhance noradrenergic neurotransmission in the human brain, thereby increasing cognitive control. Here, we investigate if changes in cognitive control induced by tVNS are mediated through locus coeruleus-induced modifications of neural activity in the anterior cingulate cortex. Young healthy participants engaged in a simple cognitive control task focusing on response inhibition and a more complex task that involved both response inhibition and working memory, inside a magnetic resonance imaging scanner. The tasks were executed using a randomized within-subject design, with participants undergoing auricular tVNS and sham stimulation in separate sessions. tVNS significantly changed performance in the simple control task reflected in a greater propensity to respond. Furthermore, we observed a significant increase in neural activity in the anterior cingulate cortex during the simple cognitive control task under tVNS. Functional connectivity analyses revealed positive coupling between neural activity in the locus coeruleus and anterior cingulate cortex, however, this was not modulated by tVNS. The findings suggest that non-invasive stimulation of the vagus nerve can modulate neural activity in the anterior cingulate cortex. While these neural effects suggest an impact of tVNS in a key region involved in conflict monitoring and cognitive control, the behavioral effects are more indicative of a shift in response bias rather than enhanced cognitive control.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.