An investigation of transcranial magnetic stimulation effects in auditory attention

Abstract

Electroencephalographic (EEG) responses evoked by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) gain more and more interest for basic neurophysiological research and possibly diagnostic purposes. In addition, the effect of TMS to the attentional processes has been reported in many studies. In this paper, the effect of TMS on auditory attention in the EEG is discussed with applying a phase stability measure and adaptive feature extraction by optimized filter banks. The phase stability measure clearly shows that TMS has influence in synchronizing the N1-P2 component of event related potentials (ERPs) where the measure in TMS evoked ERPs is much higher than ERPs without TMS. The influence of TMS and attention can also be discriminated very well and illuminate the effect of TMS in auditory attention.